


The Anatomy of a Routine Assassination

by fascinationex



Series: transformers fics by fascinationex [4]
Category: The Transformers (Cartoon Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers Generation One
Genre: Assassination Plot(s), Canon-Typical Violence, Decepticon Staff Meeting, Decepticon Tax Evasion (mentioned), Killer Robots, Other, Transformers Plug and Play Sexual Interfacing, a lot of italics, clearly non-canon worldbuilding, g1 Starscream is a horrible gremlin and I love him, raids gone wrong
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-17
Updated: 2019-10-12
Packaged: 2020-09-02 14:17:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 36,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20277277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fascinationex/pseuds/fascinationex
Summary: If Megatron had known what he was thinking—his idle dreams about the laser core humming softly beneath Megatron's hideously ugly, very heavy duty armour, and what kind of force Starscream would need to apply in order to puncture it, to crack it open like a jewellery box and dig out that sweet, vulnerable, soft-humming little prize below—he'd probably be a lot angrier.Megatron usually was, about that sort of thing





	1. Chapter 1

"I can hear you thinking," rumbled Megatron, who was predictably not nearly as deep in recharge as he outwardly appeared. His voice was hollow and deep, the product of an old set of vocal components in a very big mech.

"No you can't," said Starscream immediately, before he'd even finished flicking his optics back on. With his chin propped lazily on Megatron's oversized chassis, their light gleamed on his chest plates and cast a dull red glow between the two of them. His circuitry felt pleasantly sore. They'd used it hard.

Starscream had dropped into recharge still plugged into Megatron like some kind of savage, and he could feel the taut tug on his cable when he shifted. But, poor choice of partners aside, he was never stupid enough to give Megatron full processor access. He had firewalls for a reason.

Besides, if Megatron _had_ known what he was thinking – his idle dreams about the laser core humming softly beneath Megatron's hideously ugly, very heavy duty armour, and what kind of force Starscream would need to apply in order to puncture it, to crack it open like a jewellery box and dig out that sweet, vulnerable, soft-humming little prize below - he'd probably be a lot angrier. Megatron usually was, about that sort of thing.

However, while Starscream duly double-checked his fire walls (and contemplated the possible consequences of a little light treason before getting up for fuel), one of Megatron's big, blunt-fingered, warm hands was creeping right up his back. A tactical distraction, then, Starscream thought, warmly and drowsily, as it began drawing aimless patterns on the flattest planes of his wings. They were exquisitely sensitive, and Starscream could feel every bump and scuff on the surface of Megatron's rough hands. There was already a deep ache of want warming up beneath his plating again, unfurling through his frame. 

He considered being contrary for its own sake - he could pick himself up and leave, and make sure Megatron did not get the impression he could just _have him_ whenever he wanted - but then a slow, deep pulse of pleasure burned across his hard-used circuitry from the connection once again. The fingertips on his wing dragged across an aileron with an audible scrape that meant the giant oaf was probably leaving marks, even as he made Starscream shiver. Idly, Starscream fed all that sensation back to him through their hardline connection. He felt the heavy frame beneath him rumble and vibrate as Megatron's cooling fans startled on.

Starscream rubbed his face on his broad chest plates and let the charge between them, lazy yet with the dregs of recharge, seep slowly across his neural net. His circuits would be even sorer, later. Megatron generated an awful lot of power.

Another heady throb washed over him, leaving his senses reeling and his processor hazy. Starscream melted against Megatron with a long, badly-muffled groan.

Later. He could leave later.

* * *

He left Megatron's berthroom in the early hours of his off-cycle, still shaky on his legs, walking like a brand new electrofawn and reeking of recently dispersed charge. If anyone he passed on his way to the wash racks thought anything of that, they knew better than to comment where Starscream could hear them. Once he was clean and composed again, he headed out into the alien planet's atmosphere alone.

Rubbing his face all over Megatron's over-built, broad, rumbling chest plates had given him the beginnings of an idea, but he needed materials -- and he thought he knew where to get them.

The planet Sol-003 – that was, "Earth" – was a strange, frustrating, frequently _disgusting_ place. A lot of it was salt water, full of bizarre organic lifeforms. The water went down, seemingly forever, until even the light of the nearest star could not penetrate all the sheer breadth of black, heavy water and you thought it would never end.

Before arriving on Earth, Starscream had known that salt water accelerated rust – he'd known it intellectually, a fact sitting idle in his data-banks, in memory rarely accessed. Now he, much like the entire contingent of the Decepticon army stranded upon this vile wet planet, knew it with every itching mechanometer of his plating and right down to his core.

It was just like Megatron to have settled the lot of them at the bottom of the ocean. Getting up to the surface, despite the use of the Victory's access hatches – which were themselves vulnerable – always resulted in a new, full-frame exposure to the planet's abundant… _fluids_.

Starscream snapped his vents tightly shut and let the seawater stream off his plating to splash back to the ocean below. His outer plating was at least painted and polished, which offered some resistance. His internals weren't.

He hovered for a moment as his processor flew through flight path calculations. Below him the water rose and fell peacefully. It gave no indication of the enormous, derelict war ship beneath its glossy surface.

The planet was not entirely submerged in this heavy liquid cloak – there were places, too, where the harder, more familiar materials that made up the ground were forced up from beneath all that terrible weight of water, thrown there by the acrobatics of the planet's molten metal core, and upon that persisted an even weirder array of diverse life forms, including the noxious apex predators, the humans.

Starscream was a scientist, even if he had swapped out his laboratory equipment for a null ray several million years past. He was more or less familiar with the basics of the dominant species on the planet, biologically – "biology" being the organic equivalent to mechanology – if not socially. In several disgusting ways, he thought the humans were unsettling to Cybertronians not because they were so alien, but because they were so familiar. There were differences - big ones - but if you asked any mech who'd been to Earth what a Cybertronian made entirely out of _rotting meat_ might act like, he'd be hard pressed not to point at a human and say: "Oh, well, like _them_."

Never did this seem more painfully clear to Starscream than when he flew over one of their cities.

The humans themselves were hard to pick out at this altitude, and the cities were all stone and metal, jutting out much higher than the fleshies could possible require for their own little frames. Their vehicles, so like Cybertronian ground modes, with their alien materials and lifelessness dulled by the distance, zoomed along winding highways and inched through traffic on their bottlenecked roads.

If Starscream let his reality matrix fall idle for a moment or two, and he pulled the power it otherwise used to his creative circuits and memory core instead, he could almost be flying over old Polyhex or Praxus.

The cities he was now flying over were in an area that seemed devoid of the verdant organic grasses and trees of the landmass where the Decepticons had been roused from their millennia-long stasis. The land below was instead golden under the light of the local star, and textured with greys and browns and muted greens where the water was scarce. This looked even more like home to Starscream. Cybertron had acid rain, but no plants.

These nostalgic thoughts never failed to put him in a bitter mood. Starscream, like most Decepticons, did not like the humans very much.

Earth's atmosphere contained, just, a _truly__ sickening_ amount of water, even above the sea level. Starscream's delicate navigational equipment, so reliable on Cybertron and even in space, often needed recalibration and cleaning and he sometimes found himself (intolerably, but necessarily) reliant on the humans' network of fixed ground radio beacons while his own systems gave him nothing but confused static and nonsense.

He had to make time for a long-form recalibration later. Today, he let the radio signals and his own calculated path lead him unerringly to a burnt up oil field, strewn with scraps of human technologies (whose metal was, usually, comparatively weak and largely useless to him). There was a striped plastic ribbon cordoning the whole field off, and several large signs directing the squishies away from the area, but nothing fit to keep a Cybertronian out - if they even wanted to.

Amid the mess, Starscream found exactly what he was looking for: the remains of their downed fortress. It was big, purple, and shaped like… a something. A mechanimal, he was pretty sure, although no mechanimal Starscream had ever seen. He was sure they'd just dug the design out of the archives somewhere. Perfectly normal. ...Probably. He assumed.

Anyway, **his** project would look nothing like this.

He circled. It was badly damaged, but not, he was sure, completely worthless yet. The war had been a long one before they all crash laded here - the Decepticons were accustomed to salvaging what they could. Generally Starscream liked to delegate messy and unrewarding scavenging to, oh, _anyone else_, but this wasn't something he wanted, say, Dirge or Thrust sticking their underclocked nosecones into.

Starscream had a nascent plan for the remains of the fortress, unfurling in his processor like a slow-growing little nub of crystal catching a hint of starlight in the dark.

Starscream landed on the bitumen of a nearby, little-travelled road. When he stepped off its snaking black surface, his thruster sank immediately into the sand, too little surface area and too much weight to stay on top. He could feel the tiny grains grinding against his polish already and the cables in his neck creaked with strain. Was there no place on this ridiculous, stupid, _filthy_ planet that wouldn't compromise his plating?

As soon as he was done usurping Megatron, he was getting off this wreck. The Autobots could _have_ Earth. They'd blow it up from orbit, and hang the energy they could harvest from it. There were millions of other energy-rich targets in the universe. There were other energy-rich targets _in this very galaxy_.

And when that was done, he thought, a little dreamily, he was getting an oil bath. A proper one. _Somebody_ had to be able to bring him _fresh, clean_ oil, oil that wasn't black and impure, oil which hadn't been used by sixteen mechs already, each desperate to prevent another rust infection.

But first there was work to do.

Getting the wreckage of the fortress back to his private lab on board the Victory would have been inefficient, obvious and logistically impossible, so he gutted the it where it lay in the desert, cursing the terrain the whole time. He discarded the pieces too broken or compromised by the explosions to bother with and piled up the valuables – and there were valuables. The Decepticons' early bases on earth had all been comparatively primitive, which was to be expected given that they had largely been of Soundwave's design and construction. They had functioned, but it was plain that building was not one of Soundwave's gifts. But this purple menace was Constructicon work. The materials weren't up to Cybertronian building standards – obviously, since so many had suffered as a result of a little crude oil fire – but the engineering itself was top notch, and there were little gems deposited all throughout the otherwise defunct frame.

Starscream prised out two fully functional laser cannons from its monstrous – and monstrously ugly – 'beak' alone, and a third, only slightly damaged, from its foreleg. There was one tiny, etched chip still buried in the rubble of its chest plates, still shining and clean amid the wreckage of substandard parts. This was Cybertronian technology, which should not have been left in the middle of a burnt out oil field for the humans to get their gross, fleshy little hands on – or worse, for the Autobots to salvage.

Starscream held it up to see the tiny shape glint in the hot star light. "Fortunate, then, that I am here to put you to a far nobler purpose," he purred to it, and then smiled and tucked it away in his subspace.

He took the power core, too, only a little damaged. There were also several tiny, etched coils of celtaxium, useful in several medical procedures including processor repairs. The memory banks of the fortress would, presumably, contain the database of historical codes and commands used and received, heavily encrypted, so he had to take that, too. He took smaller pieces of the weapons systems, most of which were too large for actual Cybertronians to use, except perhaps the combiner teams. He had plans for them, too. Oh, yes.

_Vop!_

"Is _this_ where you are?" Skywarp asked, conversationally, from right behind him.

Starscream twitched one wing violently. He raised a hand to hover over his thundering fuel pump. "Skywarp."

"This stuff is going to take forever to get out of my joints," Skywarp noted, peering at one of his own thrusters, half-buried in the sand. It already had a few scrapes on it, and Starscream was almost afraid to look down at his own. He shuddered to _imagine_. He'd need to put some work into his polish when he returned to the ship.

"Have you been sorting through this scrap all day?" Skywarp sounded incredulous.

"Not," Starscream said, "that it's any of your concern how I spend my time, but yes." 'All day,' Skywarp had said, as though one planetary rotation on Earth was a real unit of time and not just the completely arbitrary measurement used by a species too short-lived to even have a standard against which to measure their own irrelevance.

Starscream had subroutines older than their whole species but - 'a day', said Skywarp, and now it was stored in his trine mate's processor. Though sluggish, it would nevertheless outlast the whole of human civilisation. A day. Starscream vented slowly.

"So… why?" wondered Skywarp.

"Unlike our glorious leader, _I _actually care if our weapons end up in the hands of the humans," said Starscream.

Skywarp squinted at him. "Really?"

Starscream ignored his dubious tone and dug deeper into what he supposed were the chest plates of the fortress. He had to dip one leg delicately into the opening he'd made as he tried to reach further, because the structure was too large for him to reach anything important otherwise. "And also," he said, kicking a piece of scrap aside, "I am going to use them to annihilate him."

"Oh," said Skywarp, sounding sort of vaguely disappointed – and worse, _bored_. "Right."

The _nerve_ of him. Starscream felt his own face plates contort, helpless to prevent the scowl from twisting them.

"Actually, Skywarp," he said, in a tone that was artificially pleased and insinuating, "I _am_ glad to see you."

"You are?" Skywarp, bless his wings, perked up.

"Yes. Of course. Aren't I always happy to see my trine mates?" He dug out the last twist of valuable etched celtaxium from the carnage of the old fortress.

"Um," said Skywarp, with a glimmer of what might have been the beginnings of alarm sparking in his dim little processor.

Starscream didn't give him time to protest. He straightened up, and then dumped some of the less delicate components he'd collected right up against Skywarp's chassis. "Here. You can carry this for me."

Skywarp had the choices of either dropping Starscream's stuff or carrying it. Wisely, he held on. "What is this? Is this the fortress's memory bank - ooh, is that a laser cannon? Does it work?"

"Do you think I'd be putting in all this work for a laser cannon that didn't work?" As a matter of fact, the laser cannon Skywarp was holding did _not_ work, because Skywarp could only barely be trusted with his own live weaponry. He had poor impulse control, a childish delight in Starscream's humiliation, and very good aim. New and novel weapons should be given to Skywarp only in the most _controlled_ of circumstances.

But Starscream had already salvaged the two laser cannons that did work, and fixing the third with two models to work from would be child's play. More importantly, the laser cannons drew Skywarp's attention away from the power core. Starscream slipped that into his subspace. Skywarp didn't need to know about it.

"Wait," Skywarp complained eventually, when he was clutching a tower of parts that he could barely see over. "Why do _I_ have to carry all this?"

"Because it's heavy," Starscream said, "and I am important." Because, well, _obviously_.

He continued loading Skywarp with the heavier items even as Skywarp shifted and fidgeted uncomfortably under the weight. He'd still be able to fly. Probably. It was fine.

"Huh," said Skywarp, once they did finally get aloft.

His take-off time was whole seconds slower than Starscream's, which just assured Starscream that he'd made the right decision in loading Skywarp up instead of himself. Imagine if he'd been the one wallowing in the sky like a blimp? He shuddered to think.

"That's a lot of stuff to still leave laying around there, isn't it, Starscream?"

Starscream tipped his wings at an angle and let his path curve lazily. Skywarp was using his name properly, which he assumed meant he had a dumb idea and wanted Starscream to agree to it.

"I bet..."

He braced himself. A thoughtful Skywarp wasn't always a good thing. "What?" he prompted shortly. He didn't have forever to listen to Skywarp's mundane blathering.

"I just bet someone else will try to do some salvaging - either the organics or the Autobots." His pace slowed even further, and he drifted like he was preparing to circle the oil field again and not just to head sensibly back to the Victory in Starscream's wake.

Nevertheless, it wasn't hard to follow where Skywarp's processor was leading.

It... wasn't a bad idea. And Skywarp had had it. Huh. How strange.

"You want to leave something for them," Starscream predicted with an indulgent smile that came across loud and clear even in his jet mode.

"Yeah," said Skywarp. "It'll be funny - you know, they show up, they dig around a little. Get comfortable. And then: boom!"

Boom indeed.

"You know," Starscream mused, "It _would_ be awfully bad manners to let them go home empty handed."

"Rude, even," Skywarp added hopefully.

Well.

Keeping Skywarp entertained would make the flight back to the Victory comparatively peaceful, and there _was_ a small chance the Autobots might return to scavenge for Decepticon technology yet. Starscream chose to indulge him.

"I suppose..."

Skywarp was on the ground again, dropping his load into the sand and digging around in the frightful mess of his subspace for components before Starscream had even landed.

It wasn't that great a hardship: some off-shifts, the thought of a bunch of Autobots going up in a blaze of chemical fire and liquefied metal kept Starscream even warmer than the anticipation of Megatron's inevitable, undignified end at Starscream's own (beautifully-polished, by then, he was sure) feet.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Megatron was always a bit too interested in Starscream’s activities whenever he disappeared from his direct line of sight for more than about three astroseconds." - Starscream comes home, reports, takes a bath, fantasises about a better bath, and has sex. In that order.

Megatron was always a bit _too_ interested in Starscream’s activities whenever he disappeared from his direct line of sight for more than about three astroseconds.

Now he was set heavily upon his throne, huge and silvery and glinting dully in the dim lighting of the Victory's command centre, with his chin propped in one hand and his cynical red gaze magnetised to Starscream. It was probably _not_ because of the sleek and beautiful angle of Starscream’s wings today.

That throne was another thing that would have to be re-thought – oh, not the fact of _having_ one, Starscream was certainly all in favour of reminding the mechanisms around him of their proper _places_ in the world. But he’d spent a lot of time lounging on it while Megatron was busy, and it wasn’t nearly as comfortable as Megatron made it look when he sat in it like that.

The lights caught on Megatron’s armour, and there was, as always, something terribly compelling about being the centre of his attention. Starscream killed several processes that wanted to divert power to thinking about – oh, irrelevant distractions. Things like how much bigger Megatron seemed when he looked up at him from up close, or how his enormous engines sounded working ever so hard just for Starscream in the dark, or about the soft, lingering throb of his own overworked pleasure circuitry.

Yes. Distracting. Better to think about the mess he’d made of his paint job mucking about in the desert. He was _abraded._

“As you can _see_,” he explained, indicating his scratched thrusters with disgust, “I’ve been in the desert, performing _menial labour_ to minimise wastage and augment the resources of the Decepticon army. Every little bit helps,” he added piously, which he supposed, in hindsight, might have been laying it on a bit thick.

The benefit to returning with Skywarp was that he had a semi-reliable witness to… _gloss over_ the finest details of what he'd been doing.

‘Reliable’ wasn't a word Starscream generally associated with Skywarp, but it was true that Skywarp was a Decepticon warrior right down to his laser core. He often stood by without being actively obstructive, but he rarely supported any serious effort at overt, outright treason (one of his _least appealing_ character flaws, in Starscream’s opinion).

“And,” Skywarp was saying now, “if anybody tries to go down there and grab the rest, they are going to have a – haha – _big_ surprise waiting for them.” His voice was so gleeful his vocal components were crackling. “I hope it’s an Autobot,” he added, wings twitching with delight, “but I won’t be too disappointed if it’s one of their dumb humans.”

From where he was working diligently on some kind of data analysis, perhaps gathered on one of Starscream's own scouting runs, Soundwave's unreadable gaze never left his screen. His face plates never changed expression – never took on an expression in the first place, more accurately. But Starscream had to trust that Skywarp's enthusiastic report of retrieving their own technology and laying a very explosive trap for any Autobot scavengers would divert suspicion.

It was, after all, a perfectly legitimate use of their time. And Skywarp didn’t have the processor space for more than one complex thought at a time.

"And you felt that this was such an urgent and important task that it required a... _personal touch_, did you, Starscream?" Megatron drawled.

Starscream’s wing twitched.

He forced his own processor to think about how absurd it was that Megatron had nothing better to do than to harass him about how he spent his off-cycle, which wasn’t exactly a difficult thing to focus on. In front of Skywarp and Soundwave, too. _Why not the whole air corps, Megatron?_ That way he could really undermine Starscream’s authority around here. He feared what might happen if his army took Starscream as _seriously_ as he deserved, obviously…

Soundwave did not move. He did not even appear to be paying attention and the rate of the data flow across his screen didn't slow. Starscream still felt him watching.

He didn't take his optics off Megatron. Next to him, Skywarp was still fidgeting, bored under Megatron's suspicious gaze as only a mech utterly secure in his ability to teleport out of danger could be.

"It didn't seem to concern you that we might allow our records and technology to fall into the possession of the Autobots by just leaving it out there to rust," said Starscream. "Perhaps it just slipped your processor? I do understand," he added silkily, "the pressures of leadership are many, and great, after all. Not everybody is so... _well suited_ to them as they _pretend_."

At that, Skywarp's bored fidgeting took on a distinctly leaning-away-from-Starscream aspect, which Starscream ignored in the face of Megatron's burning glower.

"The technology," repeated Megatron, in a tone that suggested he was contemplating what kind of crunch Starscream's cockpit might make beneath his foot. "We both know that fortress had nothing in it that the Autobots couldn't construct if they so chose."

He was right – sort of. Between the Autotbots' walking disaster of a science team and their medics, very little current technology was technically beyond them, but whether they had the stuff with which to build it was another matter.

One of Starscream's wings gave another abortive twitch. "The - the resources," he pointed out, then, grinding his teeth against a shrill whine in his voice. He didn’t like where this seemed to be headed. Why _was_ the old rusty idiot so _suspicious_? What had Starscream ever done to deserve this? “Megatron, you cannot discount the resources they could gain from –”

"Hmm. Yes. Resources," Megatron said, not as though he actually believed him, but at least as though he was considering the argument on its own merits, regardless of whatever else he thought Starscream may have been up to. Resources were always of concern to both their army, and to the Autobots. Whether or not the Autobots could make a laser canon of their own did not mean that _giving them one_ was permissible.

"And records, of course," Starscream added in quickly, buoying himself like a glider catching a new thermal. "The memory banks, they're full of -"

"Outdated Decepticon codes, yes," Megatron finished for him. There was an uncomfortable pause, and Megatron let it linger in much the same way as his gaze lingered on Starscream. "How very _conscientious_ of you, Commander Starscream.”

Megatron had a way of saying ‘Commander Starscream’ that made it sound like he was talking about the local organic life rather than his own second in command. Starscream scowled.

“And I'm just _thrilled_ to see you so full of enthusiasm for these necessary but unrewarding tasks."

“Uh,” said Skywarp then.

Starscream understood the sentiment: 'unrewarding tasks' wasn't exactly a phrase that filled him with unprecedented delight. But he also wished Skywarp would _shut up._

"Well," he hedged, preparing to backtrack rapidly, but there wasn't anywhere to backtrack to. "That is -”

"Anything to serve the cause, isn't that right, Starscream? What was it you said? Every little bit helps?"

He had said that, hadn’t he. Him and his big mouth.

Trapped, Starscream pried apart his own lip plates and ground out: "Of course.” And then, stiffly, he added: “Any task _concomitant_ with my -"

"I am delighted to hear it," said Megatron, cutting him off. He was smiling.

Skywarp inched away. _Traitor._

“Checking the imports to the Victory should keep you busy for a while,” Megatron said decisively in a voice that was hollow, smug, and full of soft scratchy feedback.

Starscream quite liked hearing that voice sometimes, usually when it was rumbling in his audial pickup while Megatron slowly rubbed his thick fingers over Starscream’s access ports. He did_ not _like hearing that voice when it was _making up pointless menial tasks_ for him to do for no reason.

“_What_,” said Starscream. His wings wrenched up and his hands balled into fists.

“And when you’re done with that,” said Megatron, “I’m sure you won’t mind completing the after-action analysis of the battle from twenty-one cycles ago.”

“_Import checks,_ Megatron –” his voice hit an ugly screech, and then he processed the second statement. “_What_ battle?” _What? Where was I?_ Starscream wondered, baffled, but only for a moment. Twenty one cycles? Had there been a battle somewhere else while they’d been caught in that tiny skirmi – No. Of course there hadn’t. His battle protocols fluctuated wildly with his temper, flicking on and off, making his power distribution system hum unpredictably.

“_Megatron,_” Starscream snarled. The null ray mounted on his arm warmed with the beginnings of a truly fine rage. “Is _this_ how I am to be rewarded for my contributions?”

Megatron’s expression said that he did not believe for a single astrosecond that Starscream had been thinking about his contributions to the Decepticon army. He stood from his throne with a clatter, unsettlingly nimble for so large a mech, and strode forward.

He loomed. Starscream took a step back, wary.

“You have your orders, Starscream,” he said in a soft, seething voice. “Do not _test my patience._”

Starscream eyed the fusion cannon strapped to Megatron’s arm, and measured the distance between them, the height of the room, the space available for take-off –

He clenched his jaw. “As you command, mighty Megatron,” he sneered.

His time would come. And _then_ he would strike.

The second the doors of the command centre swooshed closed behind them, Skywarp disappeared with a _vop_! He’d had a lot of practice avoiding the worst excesses of Starscream’s temper.

* * *

Between the grinding of the sand and exposure to yet more salt water, a wash and an oil bath was less a luxury and more a matter of grim necessity, assuming Starscream didn’t want rust in his thrusters. He very much did not.

“This room’s occupied,” he snapped at Dead End, who was occupying the wash racks he wanted to use. The sports car was pretty in a sleek, wheeled sort of way and dripping with solvents that made him gleam. He turned toward where Starscream stood in the doorway, expression shifting from regular-tired to a more specific tired-and-incredulous.

Starscream didn’t care. “Get out,” he added, in case Dead End’s defective little processor couldn’t adequately comprehend that he meant that the wash racks were now occupied, by Starscream and therefore nobody else. They were communal, of course, and more than one mech could use them at once, but if the second in command of the entire Decepticon army couldn’t even get a little privacy to clean up in, what was the point?

Dead End, _completely typically_, eyed him for just long enough to make his irritation swell.

“Those will rust through eventually anyway,” he predicted, eyeing his battered thrusters.

“_Out_,” Starscream snarled, with a jet-engine growl thrumming low in his voice that gave a fair indication of his possible power output. Even if he wasn’t vastly outranked, they both knew it was significantly higher than a sports car’s.

He did not seem much fazed by Starscream’s tone. He hesitated as though it might, possibly, be even slightly worth arguing about it. But at last he vacated the room, not very quickly, muttering to himself. Starscream didn’t bother to try to hurry him further: actual threats of violence were really only so motivating to a mech like Dead End, who was already patently convinced of his impending destruction.

He did command the doors shut the moment Dead End’s shiny aft had cleared them. Then he locked the room with his own codes and dove under the spray of hot solvents.

Starscream took his time cleaning, coating every bit of plating and scrubbing it down methodically. After cleaning, he washed long streams of oil through his frame beneath his plates. The oils available on Sol-3 were impure without extensive filtering, and these in particular had been much recycled – had they not been so necessary on this wet little mudball, Starscream would certainly have turned his nose up at them. Despite the disgusting and gritty feel and vile smell, the feeling of hot oil slowly coating all of the hard to reach places beneath his armour was soothing and, in its way, relaxing.

Just as long as Starscream did not dwell on who might have used this oil before him – the Stunticons being a prime example – it even marginally improved his mood.

...He’d kill for a proper oil bath.

One not in a trickling dirty stream he had to angle under the edges of his plates, but in a huge tub, heated by coils spread through the metal – with pure, clean oils, almost perfectly clear. He lost himself in the fantasy briefly, his memory banks and imagination matrix conspiring to dream up a rosy vision of slow, luxurious bubbles floating lazily to the surface of a veritable lake of perfectly heated oil. He’d slide in, one step at a time, shut off his optics. The thin silky feel of it would glide lovingly over every gleaming mechanometre of his plating, coat his sensitive internals –

The door’s locks disengaging startled him out of his fantasy.

Just as well, really. He was supposed to be fantasising about power and dominion, not the minor luxuries he’d once taken for granted. Megatron had a lot to answer for, regarding the Decepticons' present quality of living. If you could even call it that.

He let his optics flicker back on. Their dull glow lit up the spilled oils before him in a multicoloured sheen.

“Is this where you’ve been for the last six joors?” Megatron’s voice asked, sounding like he didn’t quite believe it.

Starscream crossed his arms and turned to face him, scowling. “Salvage is a messy business,” he sniffed.

Then he looked Megatron up and down critically, taking in his hideous, dull plating, silver-grey like some long-dead thing. Only the satin finish made him seem alive at all. If Starscream had been cursed with that palette he’d… well, he’d have gotten a repaint. But if not, he’d at least be mirror finished. “Not that _you’d_ know anything about keeping clean and presentable, I suppose,” he added.

“I know it doesn’t take six joors,” Megatron pointed out. Then his voice took on a steelier tone. “And that it’s not what I told you to be doing.”

“Busywork,” Starscream scoffed. He was tempted to turn back to the trickling oils but it was not always, or even often, wise to turn one’s back on Megatron. He wasn't sure of his mood just yet. “It can be done any time. My plating, on the other hand--”

“The state of your _finish_ will not be what allows the Decepticon army to defeat the Autobots, Starscream, despite what you seem to think.”

Starscream rolled his optics, because of course Megatron had no idea how important it in fact was to look good. As second in command, optics (Autobot and Decepticon alike) were constantly on him, and what would it say if they _all_ allowed themselves to fall to the kind of standard Megatron evidently found acceptable? Even among Starscream’s own air corps, there was not always the level of _presentation_ he considered ideal, although of course with _him_ as a role model they were better off than any _ground_ soldier…

“If I want to spend my off-cycle marinating in solvent, I don’t see why that’s anyone else’s business. I certainly don’t have to spend it completing _invented tasks_ just to gratify your enormous ego.” He synthesised a sniff, a curious sound that had little purpose to a Cybertronian, except to convey disdain. “In fact, I seem to recall that the door was locked?”

“There were complaints,” Megatron said, dry as dust.

Of course there were. Did Dead End ever do anything else? _Not_ that Megatron would have taken the slightest notice had it not suited him to do so.

Starscream let the oil stream stop and, deciding Megatron wasn’t about to do anything rash immediately, began sluicing off the excess. A proper polish would have to wait, it seemed. “I notice you didn’t bother to address the nature of the _punishment detail_ I’ve been unjustly assigned,” he said. He threw a look over his wing at Megatron and found the low-burning embers of his red optics fixed on the oiled sheen of his plating, significantly lower than his face. Typical, he thought, half-fond and entirely scathing.

Megatron gave a great humming sigh through his vents. “Put a lid on it, Starscream,” he said. “We both know you didn’t fly all the way out to the desert for salvage.”

Starscream whipped around in outrage, because _no they did not both know that._ Starscream knew that! But there was no way for _Megatron_ to have known that!

“You have no proof,” he hissed. The words hung in the air, short and flat. In the immediate, echoing silence and clarity of hindsight, that may have been a little bit suspect.

Megatron, too, seemed to find this response a trifle telling, as he straightened up with a soft creak and advanced upon him. The unfortunate thing about Megatron was that he was big, and his generators were huge, and his maximum power output therefore outstripped Starscream's own by, just, _so much_. Each step seemed suddenly thunderous, and the space between them was suddenly so very small.

“Starscream,” he rumbled, ominously, “what have you done this time?”

“Nothing,” Starscream said quickly, immediately in fact. He tried to ignore the uncomfortable feeling of his wings both shifting and moving, priming themselves for flight as several self-preservation subroutines were tripped in rapid succession. Calculations for take off started popping up, already looking unhappy about the close quarters even as Megatron advanced. “I’ve done nothing!”

He backed away another step, too cautious to scramble on the oiled and slippery floors, and then another, until his proximity sensors told him that if he backed up any further he’d jeopardise his ability to transform and fly.

Megatron kept encroaching upon him, however, feet heavy and optics burning red and predatory. Starscream held firm because he had to. There was no room. He was backed against the slick wall of the wash racks, wings trembling, fuel pump stuttering slightly right beneath his laser core as Megatron's enormous shadow fell over him.

Megatron could not _possibly_ know. Not even Skywarp was stupid enough to go running immediately to tell Megat– alright, no, Skywarp _was_ that stupid. But even if he _didn’t_ know better than to court a Starscream-level temper tantrum, he would not have taken the risk that Megatron might be annoyed enough to shoot the messenger.

Besides, Starscream truly _hadn’t_ done anything. Yet. Well. _Yet, lately._

“I am innocent,” he snarled.

Megatron snorted.

“Do you know, Starscream, I almost believe you,” he said contemplatively, which was when Starscream realised that while he’d been processing the relative probability of Megatron having somehow uncovered his nascent plot – low! very low! – Megatron had moved well into grappling range.

His hand, cool compared to Starscream’s oil-warmed plating, slid smoothly over the plates at Starscream’s waist, which was not at all the lunge and grab Starscream had been anticipating. Megatron’s low-polish, unadorned hands were huge, and he could run his thumb along the seam where the reinforced cockpit met the opaque metal of Starscream’s ventral plating without taking his hand from the tight curve of his waist.

When he leaned forward, one of Starscream’s wings hit the damp wall behind him and he stilled, trapped there between Megatron’s bulk and the Victory's wall. He felt pinned. And as close as they were, he could hear the dull whine and thump of Megatron’s internal mechanisms, and the creak of old poorly cared-for joints beneath.

“Let’s keep it that way,” Megatron advised in a low, thrumming voice that was probably intended to sound threatening.

Starscream was no longer listening. The hot wash of air from Megatron’s vents and the purr of his deep, hollow voice murmuring in Starscream’s audial pickup made his heat redistribution system come online, and the tone of voice sent his threat and interfacing systems into confused, simultaneous disarray.

His fans turned smoothly on, blowing heat out gently through his own vents, and he arched his frame against Megatron’s encouragingly. Yes, this would be _so much better_ than getting shot for something he hadn't even done yet. A perfect distraction for Megatron. The motion rubbed the cover of the primary interfacing ports low in his chest armour across Megatron’s battered armour, smearing oil slickly across both of them. It left a multicoloured sheen on his plating and Megatron’s systems gave a low, interested hum.

Starscream thumbed the catches on the old-fashioned housing of Megatron’s cable – higher on his chest, a spot that had never been updated, much like most of the essentials of Megatron’s frame. In the case of interfacing equipment that wasn’t such a bad thing: now the original equipment was sensitive with millennia of processor associations, paths built with repeated use. Starscream heard – and felt, in a thrilling little vibration that made him push harder against his huge body – Megatron’s engines give a startled growl when he shoved his fingers under the protective cover and dragged them over the thick coils of heavy duty cabling beneath.

Megatron exhaled a huge, hard vent, heat billowing damply between their frames and collecting in beads of condensation on their armour. He dragged his hands down Starscream’s waist, over his hips, scraping harshly and making him shudder with the sensation. He dug his fingers into his thighs, and then hoisted him up, braced hard against the wall. It did not seem to take him much effort to lift Starscream cleanly and easily off the floor.

One of Starscream’s wings scraped on the surface. He ignored it, clutching at Megatron’s heavy armour, digging his fingers in between plates to tug enticingly at what wires he could reach beneath. In background processing, he contemplated how far beneath the surface he could get his fingers at the optimal angle, and if it was deep enough to rip and do some real damage. It wasn't. He filed the thought, although imagining it made his own fans start to whine. There was a heady, throbbing want unfurling in his circuitry.

The position brought them closer in height, and Megatron growled low against one of those port covers in Starscream’s chest armour, which popped open between one hard shiver and the next without any further instructions from Starscream at all. As though this was an invitation, and _not_ a completely involuntary response, Megatron leaned in and shoved his tongue into the port there, like a filthy savage, probably because he _was_ a filthy savage.

Starscream clutched his hideously ugly helm closer and moaned loudly. He hooked his legs around him and let Megatron grope shamelessly at his aft. He arched into the wet action of that tongue, scraping his wings loudly against the wall behind him.

Then Megatron plugged in, hardly even fumbling with his cable – without asking, of course, the brute – and the wave of charge that slammed through the channel between them lit up every millimetre of pleasure circuitry accessible to Starscream’s neural system. The raw power of it overwhelmed him, bliss burned and throbbed, and his visual feed cut briefly into static. Starscream could feel his legs clenching and releasing, blown actuators letting his limbs shake, screeching against Megatron’s armour.

His fans weren’t whining now – he could hear them screaming. Or maybe that was his voice. _Something_ was making a lot of noise.

“Come on, Starscream,” Megatron purred to him, the smug rust-licker, “you can do better than that.”

Then, terribly -- fantastically -- the heady wave of charge got even stronger, more power, more force and speed (because the unfortunate, horrible, knee-shaking thing about Megatron was that his generators were huge, and his maximum power output therefore outstripped Starscream's own by, just, oh, _so much_) and – it was chasing the signals already playing havoc with his circuitry, and when they collided Starscream’s frontal processing dropped out completely. He shook, and shook, and overloaded so hard his sensory processor tried to shove a memory dump at him, like it didn’t know what to do with the sensation and had decided it was some kind of _terminal error_.

Something was whimpering. Starscream hoped it wasn’t him.

Another throb of charge across the hard line link. Starscream twitched. Because the actuators controlling the link between his limbs and his processor were completely blown, it had no strength behind it.

It was definitely him whimpering.

“Megatron,” he said, hoarse, optics flickering and senses reeling, and Megatron laughed against his cockpit.

“Come here,” he said, shoving at Starscream's thighs and dragging his face closer with his huge, overly strong hand. Starscream would not have resisted if he’d even been able to.

He scraped his hands over Megatron’s enormous chassis. Such a big, heavy, high-power frame, purring against him in delight. Oh. _Ohh._

“Whatever nonsense you’re plotting now can wait,” he told Starscream.

"Mm," Starscream grunted agreeably, thinking internally: _You are **severely** underestimating my ability to multitask_. But he let himself relax, humming with bliss, into Megatron’s arms. For now.

It was surely best to keep Megatron distracted, anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you like this fic and you are inclined toward commenting, drop me a comment and let me know what you liked.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Starscream plots, actually does some real work, seethes about Megatron's past offences, plots some more, and has a grand idea. Also, Thundercracker's here.

Checking the imports into the Victory’s main systems was not a hard task, but it was the very definition of unrewarding.

All that needed to be done was a check for damaged or nonsensical data, a quick skim for Autobot interference, and then a visual scan to ensure every update returned 'import successful'. Before the war, it was completely automated. It wasn't something anybody thought of as a task that needed doing, any more than they thought about manually pumping the fuel to fly a ship. 

And then at the onset of war, it became painfully obvious that such centralised systems in large ships were a critical defensive point. Instead of live updates, batch processes were introduced. And only a few centuries later, the _manual_ checking of those batch processes was introduced.

It could no longer be done by a drone, because the task required at least a _little_ critical thought. But it was processor-numbing and required standing at a console for the whole period doing nothing but staring at the data flow. There was very little chance that something might actually go wrong, and if it did, the sole responsibility of the mech manning the imports was just to alert Soundwave.

It was the very definition of “necessary but unrewarding”, and it was also _so far_ below Starscream's capabilities – and _rank_ – that it was insulting to be ordered to do it.

He wasn't going to do it.

_Obviously_ he wasn’t going to do it. 

But since that _was_ obvious, Megatron had also dumped sixteen joors of tactical analysis of their last skirmish with the Autobots upon him.

Starscream could order someone else, without even an astrosecond's pause for shame – in this case, Thrust – to run the imports.

This task wasn't concomitant with Thrust's skills or rank, either, but he'd been in the wrong place at the wrong time - namely the time when Starscream had left the wash racks, sore circuits still throbbing pleasantly but processor running at high speed. And Skywarp had already made himself scarce. 

Delegation was an important leadership skill, obviously. So Starscream had delegated, smirking, and any poisonous looks that followed his wings down the Victory's dim, creaking corridors were summarily ignored.

The tactical analysis, Starscream knew he could not shirk, or, ah, delegate. It was was the longer, more difficult, more labour-intensive task – and although it was also vastly more interesting, after the first few joors it became equally tiresome. Nevertheless, it was, as promised, at least _arguably necessary _work. Very few other mechanisms in the Decepticon army had the necessary specs on their tactical co-processor – Megatron himself, Soundwave. And Shockwave, probably, too, although that brought its own logistical problems.

Starscream would not delegate the work, because delegating responsibility for tasks that _were_ concomitant with his rank and skills , however boring, had the regrettable tendency of encouraging underlings to become _overly ambitious_. So he let the analysis crunch exhaustingly away in background processing, eating up more and more resources as it grew to encompass a greater number of variables.

He did not allow it to distract him from his own priorities. There was plenty of work to be done with his salvaged goods from Megatron's desert fortress. A lot of that work, particularly the programming, would require more processing power than Starscream presently had available – this, he sourly assumed, was Megatron’s plan: he knew that Starscream was up to something, but not what, and wanted to slow it down to a crawl by overwhelming him with work, and... work. 

His circuits hummed. It was a distracting reminder.

However, there were tasks that required minimal heavy lifting from his processor. The parts needed to be cleaned and sorted. Some of them went in a bin destined for the repair bay. This was firstly because a salvage mission with no appreciable salvage was suspicious at best; secondly, a properly-stocked repair bay benefited Starscream just as much as, or more than, anyone else. 

Statistically speaking, Starscream needed repairs more often than most of the Decepticons -- usually because of one of Megatron's childish temper tantrums.

The power core and chips he kept for his own purposes. A power core was not quite a laser core, and would do nothing for a regular Cybertronian, but it served a drone very much as a laser core served a mech. They were also hard to get in sufficient size to power anything as big as the fortress had been, owing to the materials needed. Those were found only in trace quantities on Earth, and had been the reason the Decepticons had needed to collaborate with the humans to implement their flight-capable drone operation. This one, having been forgotten in the belly of the ugly fortress they'd abandoned in the desert, was exactly what Starscream needed for his little project. The other components would be much easier to find.

The work felt productive, even with the analysis chewing through resources in his background processing. That was probably why Starscream didn't hear Thundercracker enter the laboratory and approach until he was standing right next to him.

"Starscream," he said, from where he was suddenly _right there_.

"Thundercracker." Starscream twitched. It was one thing to have Skywarp sneak up on him – Skywarp could teleport, and enjoyed the startlement caused by sudden appearances. Thundercracker was quieter in general, but he wasn't sneaky.

There was a long pause. Thundercracker's eyes drifted from Starscream to his soldering iron, to the trailing line of solder and back. 

"Yeah," he said.

Starscream shut off the iron and put it down. 

"Is this a drone?" Thundercracker prompted after a few moments of looking at each other in such profound silence that Starscream could hear the hum of the ship. Thundercracker looked down at the coils and circuits and tiny gleaming chips that Starscream was working with. "Like that Nightbird thing? But... bigger. And, uh, purpler."

'That Nightbird thing' had been part of Starscream's inspiration, yes, although it had been frightfully primitive compared to Cybertronian technology. Megatron's insinuations that some vile human-made little _drone_ might be capable of doing any part of Starscream's job still made his whole processor go white-hot with fury.

Initially, he had thought to use it in this plan, but there were several problems with the thought: the robot's specs made it a poor candidate for re-working, and, despite Megatron's degrading commentary, that thing had not come with the necessary power to breach Megatron's armoured plating. Even when Bombshell had been done with it, it was mostly a sneak-thief – the Autobots had been reluctant to damage it, and that had been the only reason for its relative success in the operation for which the Decepticons had appropriated it. One hit from Starscream's null ray had taken it out of commission entirely, and the same could _not_ be said about most Cybertronian bodies.

Megatron, in particular, seemed to shake off the average blast from Starscream's null ray as though it was about as damaging as warm oil. Starscream suspected this was, at least in part, due to upgraded back armour.

So the Nightbird was a poor choice for this project. He had still considered, seriously, using it anyway as a matter of sheer irony. Megatron wanted to replace him, _Starscream_, with a second-rate scrapheap _human made_ drone? It would serve him right if Starscream had repurposed the ugly thing to be the very instrument of Megatron’s downfall!

Still. The thing required so many changes it might as well be rebuilt, and it was too well-protected to be worth it in any case. He could steal it from the humans' "secure" facility, but it would be conspicuous. Likely it would draw Autobot attention.

"I didn't choose the colour," he said, instead of elaborating on any of his thoughts. Megatron was overly fond of purple, if you asked him. It was garish and predictable. Personally, Starscream favoured _gold_. Maybe he should see about acquiring a crown... 

"Is this another plot to kill Megatron and take over the Decepticons," Thundercracker said, casually, with the air of someone saying: 'oh, there's a body in my way and I'm going to go around it'. Like Starscream's assassination plots were boring, like they were common and workaday things and not _grand schemes whose scope Thundercracker's little processor could only barely grasp in his wildest fantasies._

Starscream glowered at him. It felt a lot more effective against someone his own height, although Thundercracker didn't seem bothered. "So what if it is?” he snapped.

Thundercracker looked at the drone, then back at Starscream. "You're making a drone to assassinate Megatron for you," he said slowly. Then, "Screamer, not to encourage you, but if _you_ can't assassinate Megatron, why would a _drone_ be able to?"

This was, Starscream allowed, despite his irritation, a fair question. 

His combat skills far exceeded the bulk of the army's. Starscream would bet on himself against any opponent his size and relative power, but the sheer brute force Megatron could bring to bear was overwhelming, as they had regular proof. Starscream didn't have the figures, strictly speaking, but given his long experience of Megatron, he was reasonably confident that he couldn't generate a _third_ of his enormous, overwhelming power output, a fact that drove him _absolutely wild_. With anger. 

Thundercracker's belief that no drone could outmatch Starscream's own skills was, of course, completely reasonable. Drones weren't big on critical thinking or changing tactics on the fly or, really, doing anything they hadn't been carefully programmed for.

He still didn't have patience for a question with such an obvious answer. "Because, you _fool_, I'm going to _make_ it able to!"

"Right," Thundercracker said, in the tone of one not touching that statement. "Anyway... I'm here to tell you there's a raid and you're leading it."

A raid. It had to be one of the soft targets he had identified in the last scouting run, which had been processed in due course from his data by Soundwave and selected as an optimal place from which to draw energy for conversion. Energon took precedence over most other work.

Every Decepticon knew the taste of energon siphoned from grey frames by now. The impurities were noticeable. And they... lingered on the palate. They may have needed the power to send back to Cybertron, but from a practical viewpoint, getting off _rations _was the most consistent contributor to their enthusiasm for raiding. 

However, Starscream was already occupied with a task for Megatron – a fact he could not have forgotten, unless those ancient circuits were getting even rustier. "He wants me to lead it?" he repeated. "He'll have to pick between that and his precious tactical analysis of a tiny skirmish with the aerial bots–" he paused, eyeing Thundercrakcer, who looked _obnoxiously_ resigned now. "What did he actually say?"

Thundercracker shifted on his heels. "He said that since you're 'so enthusiastic' recently, he knows it'll be 'your pleasure' to do both," he reported dutifully. "Whatever that means. Are you and Megatron fighting again?"

"Not for long," said Starscream darkly. This didn't seem to make Thundercracker feel any better, which he attributed to the fact that Thundercracker had insufficient vision to really consider how much better his life would be under truly _competent_ leadership. Typical.

Thundercracker glanced at the drone again. "Didn't we take that Nighbird thing off the humans and reprogram it anyway?" he said dubiously.

And... yes. Yes. They had. 

This wasn't an issue Starscream had previously considered, but it was entirely possible that someone could take his drone off him and change its programmed behaviour... "We did," he allowed, "although obviously I have already accounted for that little design flaw." 

Well, he _would_ account for it, anyway. Now that he'd thought of it.

He just needed a unique attribute to key his drone to. Not a code or anything that could be transmitted easily by anyone – such things were vulnerable to Soundwave's surveillance, and Soundwave was... something of a _loyalist_. 

Starscream did not mind loyalty as a general principle. He just preferred that it was loyalty to, well, _him_.

He tapped his fingertips on the solid metal curve of the drone's chest plates for a moment. Laser core signatures differed from mech to mech of course, but that would necessitate getting sufficient proximity, and Starscream did not necessarily wish to give it orders from nearby. Nearby sounded like 'in range' to him, which ought to be avoided if possible.

It needed to be something _unique_, something _effortless_, something not easily imitated, and ideally... something he could encode in his commands via comms or speakers or...

"Screamer," said Thundercracker. 

Starscream's wing twitched. He was resigned to the insulting and overfamiliar form of address from Skywarp, who had all the manners of a badly trained cybercat, but Thundercracker was meant to be the polite one.

His voice wasn't even that – 

Starscream paused.

"Screamer," Thundercracker tried again, and again Starscream ignored him. He was onto something here.

His voice... was unique, even if it was not unique in the stupid, offensive way Skywarp implied. And recordings had qualities that real, primary-audial-experience voice imprints just didn't. His voice was the _perfect_ attribute.

He made a little hum of satisfaction and preened.

"_Starscream_," said Thundercracker loudly.

"What," snapped Starscream.

"The raid," Thundercracker said, long-suffering. "At least accept the data file, so if anyone asks I can say I told you."

No doubt using Thundercracker as an errand bot was another insulting ploy of Megatron's – seeding dissension between his seekers when he knew they might otherwise close ranks under threat.

"Yes, yes," muttered Starscream, waving at him dismissively. He took the file and Thundercracker closed the line between them. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for reading! If there's something you liked about this, please feel free to let me know in a comment :)


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Starscream immediately enacts his brilliant idea from last chapter, gets some work done, and organises a raid.

As soon as Starscream opened the file, it sprawled out across his frontal processing. Soundwave's work was as precise as ever, but he was running multiple processes at once, and adding another dimension made half his systems stall out for a aimless, thoughtless astrosecond. Starscream stopped moving, killing all the processes controlling voluntary motion for the few moments he needed to sort the information out. He felt, distantly, Thundercracker tap his wing gently against Starscream's - too lightly to scratch or even smudge - before he left, unacknowledged.

A second later, Starscream shunted the raid information into short term storage and put out a notice on the general comms channel. It was a raid with low targets, unlikely to see combat. It would not be carried out until he'd gotten though the analysis and taken his ration, and if Megatron didn't like the schedule he could get off his gargantuan aft and fix it himself.

But the general comms remained quiet except for the dull pings of acknowledgement from the mechs concerned, and no reprimands or pointed queries appeared in response, so Starscream put it off and lowered his helm back to his work.

Voice imprint. That was easy enough. He could do that. The drone already knew how to target and shoot, that was already in there and had simply needed to be... redirected. But Thundercracker had had a point, so Starscream got started on basic voice commands immediately. Stop. Move [direction]. Shoot. Just the necessities, to begin with. He could give it more complex command processing when half his processor was not occupied.

The AI from the fortress, stripped down and with all its safety features eviscerated, still demanded titles for tasks. Something to do with its accessibility programming. Starscream shrugged, input ‘Destroying Megatron’, and left it at that.

The analysis, when he pulled it up to really attend to any areas of serious interest, did not provide them with anything he couldn't have guessed: Ravage's speed was his only protection against getting hurled through the masonry. Skywarp would be a real threat on the battlefield if he could keep his processor on task for more than thirty astroseconds at a time. The autobot front liners _did_ have jet packs, and those jet packs _did_ take them high enough to threaten the average atmospheric flier. Another piece of information already guessed but nice to see confirmed: those jet packs would explode if shot with a fair degree of accuracy.

The skirmish had been utterly typical. It had involved mechs they had a lot of data on already, and in doing so had not offered much new intelligence. The analysis gave them nothing, but it had had potential.

There was no way Megatron could have known for sure that it wouldn't reveal new data when he assigned it – unless he had already run it. He would not have wasted the resources for that, because Starscream's time was, despite Megatron's misgivings, valuable. Starscream's skills made it valuable. Megatron would have had him killed by now had he not needed him so dearly.

So, no. Their glorious leader had looked at the scenario, _guessed_ it would provide no useful insights, assigned it to Starscream on that basis and... been right.

Annoying.

It would have been nice to force him to laud Starscream in public and give him the commendations that new, high-quality intel wrested from the dinky little collation of collective after-battle accounts could have provided. Especially when it arose from a task that Megatron had intended to be laborious and boring busywork.

But no, what he got was the same tactical assessments Starscream had made over and over: The combaticons wasted energon and lacked discipline, Ravage needed to get out of combat range as fast as he entered it, the autobot frontliners were not changing tactics because the same tactics were _**still working**, looking at you again, Ramjet_.

Starscream labelled and tagged his analysis and filed it. Only astroseconds later, Soundwave had acknowledged it, like he had nothing better to do than to wait around for soporific tactical analyses of minor skirmishes. He probably _didn’t._

Starscream pulled the raid file again as he cleaned up the drone's nascent processor. When he closed its helm up, he ran his thumb down the scarred and pitted purple plating. Starscream's design was not a mechanimal, and certainly nowhere near as large as Megatron's fortress - but it was bigger than he was. Had it been a real mech, it would have been a big one indeed. A heavy tank, maybe, or a shuttle. Of course, the drone could not transform.

The streaks of bare metal made it look like a patchwork monster, chimeric. It was ugly yet, and unfinished, but the voice commands should work – and, more importantly, should prevent anybody wresting control of it away from him. A simple command in his own voice was all it would respond to.

He patted it affectionately before heading out, and locked the lab behind him.

He needed energon, and then apparently he had a dinky little raid to plan.

When they left, it was raining.

Generally the atmosphere of the alien planet offered enough resistance to make atmospheric flying _regrettably damp_ but not actively unpleasant: it gave them strange winds, odd drafts rising from the ground, the beat of the bright yellow star above them. It was also full of dust, dirt, strange organic matter and foreign chemicals, which would need to be scrubbed away later, but it was usually pleasant and harmless in the moment.

However, sometimes ...it rained. This was another facet of life on this tiny alien planet that Starscream could very much have done without. Every so often, the wet mess he tentatively designated ‘Sol-3’s Atmosphere’ decided it was _too wet_ and promptly purged all its hideous weight of water back down onto the surface.

It was no Cybertron, that was certain.

Skywarp looked up at the sky from their launch position and made a thin, overblown noise of despair.

Starscream still hadn’t made time for the increasingly necessary long-form recalibration of his navigational suite. He, too, eyed the rain unhappily. It wasn’t usually salty, coming from above like that – not like it was in the oceans. But depending on where you went and the human activity, seasonal changes and geographical features, the water bucketing from the skies could be brutally acidic. It had worse impact than just a little navigational confusion. He could already feel the phantom sensation of it trickling into his internals where it would leave a burning trail that lasted for cycles after cleaning.

Megatron came to see the raid off, although whatever else he was doing had yet precluded him from actually commanding it. Perhaps he was waiting to oversee the movement and construction of the space bridge at Shockwave's next coordinates – they were expecting a dispatch from Cybertron, and Shockwave was not likely to be late. A mech reset his internal chronometer against Shockwave's schedules.

Or maybe Megatron just liked being _dry_, Starscream thought. He glowered at Megatron fiercely. It wasn’t a very charitable thought, but then, Starscream wasn’t a very charitable person.

"Do not fail me, _mission leader Starscream_," Megatron warned, watching him with optics that glowed beneath the shadowed ridges of his old fashioned helm. 'Mission leader Starscream' had the tone of heavy irony with which Megatron so often chose to pronounce Starscream's rank and various titles, as though he himself had not been the one to _grant_ most of them, right at the beginning.

Starscream bared his teeth right back, ostensibly in a smile, and he saw Megatron's optics flicker and dim as they dropped right to them. He knew they were both imagining them crushing a major fuel line, although perhaps with _different feelings_.

"Me?" he said, lifting his chin, which did not really make him seem any taller standing before Megatron. "_Fail_?"

_Hardly_. As though Starscream's occasional mishaps in any way outweighed Megatron's much more significant disasters - worse yet, Megatron's failures could usually have been avoided by simply _listening to Starscream_.

He stiffened his wings and scoffed. "Your processor is getting rusty."

"We'll see," said Megatron cynically, glancing up at the skies. 

With this _rousing declaration of faith_ from their _vaunted military leader_, Starscream's tiny raiding party moved out.

Into the rain.

As if on cue, the electrostatic discharge in Sol-3’s atmosphere lit up the entire sky brilliantly, crackling right across it. A moment later, the dark sky growled down at them.

Even Thundercracker’s stoic resignation seemed to falter a little at that. But there was nothing for it.

With occasional bursts of electricity confusing his already-unreliable navigation something fierce and cold water slicking unpleasantly over his plating, Starscream opted to get the flight over and done with as fast as possible. The shelter of even a tiny human building would almost be comfortable by comparison.

Overhead, below and all around him, thunder snarled and electricity flashed at the same time.

Spitefully, he wondered if Megatron had planned this.

But no, _Starscream_ had set the schedule.

...Maybe Megatron had planned _that_.

He scowled, sure that in some way this had to be Megatron’s fault. It usually was, when he found himself this _intolerably uncomfortable_. "Hurry up," he snapped over the air corps general line.

"We're following _you_," said Skywarp, which was true, and so he sped up and didn't deign to respond.

Their target on this occasion was a tiny power plant serving an isolated area of the country. It was a place of dilapidated and crude structures, fed by one sluggishly-moving river, which appeared deep and grey, cutting through the lush vegetation in Starscream's readouts. The target was one of the least of those he'd reported on his scouting run, with a very minimal likelihood that they'd have access to combat and a small haul. The plant did not even produce a gigawatt of energy under normal circumstances, on its own. Which was of course why Megatron had picked it.

The Decepticons were not being kindly seen to by the natives the way the Autobots were. What energon they got came from raids or from the grey frames of their enemies (or, sometimes, their fellows). Taking a short, boring little raid like this was not glorious, was not worthy of commendation, but it was vital. In short, _ unrewarding but necessary_.

Huge, hundreds-of-astrolitres raids were a gamble. The Autobots were almost guaranteed to monitor and show up to protect any human settlement large enough to produce that kind of energy output, and that meant that energon acquisition had to be balanced against the output used in fighting them and recovering from injuries. The payoff from a raid on a huge military facility could be enormous, but if they didn't have a store to lean on, one large scale raid that went bad might end them. And they didn't have that store. Not anymore.

The reactors beneath the great cities of Cybertron were dark and quiet now, and Shockwave's strict discipline was all that had kept their home base operational for the last four million years - a feat which, reading between the stark bland lines of his reports, had nearly offlined him more than once during the long period of the Decepticons' stasis on Earth.

Small raids, like this one, with a low risk rating and a lower-yet yield, were boring, discouraging and did not even have the promise of combat to alleviate their tedium. For any Decepticon, onlined for war and war alone, that was basically a deal breaker. They didn't yield enough to build great weapons or online new soldiers or even operate the space bridge for more than a minute at a time. But what they produced was _rations._

Starscream took Thundercracker and Skywarp and did not bother to take any mechs with ground based alt modes along - if this went to plan they'd be done in under two joors, including the flight. Grounders, even the ones with antigravs installed for their root modes, would just slow them down.

There was something soothing and homey about the roar of engines from Skywarp and Thundercracker thrumming so close, tightly in formation with him, blasting warmth and noise over the rain and cold. This discipline was not likely to last long, but it did not need to. The raid would be fast. That was the point of taking only fast, light flight frames: no waiting for the infantry to trundle along catching up, no worrying about what ground vehicle their covering fire might get hit...

The humans' surveillance did not pick them up. Three seconds of work led Starscream right to the weakness in their security - which was the people, because it was always people, and all he had to do was ask a dumb human for access via a line of white text on a screen. Starscream did it on the approach, half paying attention, and made an unflattering staticky noise through his speakers when the human hit return, apparently automatically.

He suspected there would be additional systems inside the facility, but the outer ones were all state of the art - or what passed for it, for humans - and so had to be stored on a server somewhere. It appeared for all intents and purposes that nobody was even going to notice him writing over today's files with yesterday's to cover their approach.

Well! So much for human 'surveillance'.

"Foolish little insects," he muttered darkly, feeling... curiously slighted. There was something to be said for a nice, easy raid, but they could have made a bit more of an _effort. _Unappreciated on all fronts and feeling spiteful about it, Starscream lined up a bunch of delete directory commands and then triggered them savagely.

He brought down their little intranet, as well, as they lost altitude. Skywarp ripped down the wires for their crude alien comms at Starscream's command. That left them with no way to call for help except for running and using their own vocalisers, which further lessened the chances of combat.

Thundercracker took out the security door. The materials just cracked and blew in when his blaster fire hit it and rapidly heated parts of the building materials, and beneath that, metal screamed as it was twisted out of shape. Alarms shrilled in response to the building being damaged. Several of the humans began to screech right along with them.

In amid the panic and chaos - and the little barks of their tiny organic ventilation systems, which fought against the minute particles from the wall that now floated in the air - the humans didn't immediately notice the deletion of a few thousand files, because... of course they didn't. _Organics_.

Together the seekers descended, shifted to root mode, and met the ground with a gentle thump - for them - which nonetheless rattled the place to its foundations. Starscream glanced up at the roof suspiciously, but nothing seemed liable to fall on him just yet. Organics weren't built on a Cybertronian scale, and their construction could be... unreliable. Slipshod. _Bad_.

The cubes brought forward from where they'd been collapsed into subspace, and the three of them began filling them before all of the human workers had even responded to the alarms.

"There's not that much here," Thundercracker said skeptically.

"I know," Starscream snapped, raising his voice to be heard over the noise of the alarms and the humans and the relentless rain drumming down outside. "Drain it dry."

A small contingent showed up to offer resistance, such as it was, but their firearms were small and unless they got a lucky shot into a vent or an optic, their tiny ballistics could do very little damage to a Decepticon warrior. It was more funny than effective - funny for Skywarp, anyway, whose humour tended toward the juvenile.

"Ha! Look at them run, Starscream!" he crowed. He darted teasingly between the shots of the humans' firearms - which were even less likely to damage Skywarp than anyone else, given that they couldn't hit him and didn't have software sufficient to predict his movements - and engaged his warp drive with a laugh that turned to breathy static when he teleported.

Teleportation brought him behind a little squad of the tiny, poorly-armed insects. The group of them jumped and whirled, opening fire again. It was equally ineffective as it had been before.

Skywarp's mounted guns were a lot more efficient, even if he fired them wildly and giddily. 

That wild firing, Starscream thought, watching with a mix of irritation and indulgence, was bad for their rate of energon consumption. But they were putting aside a stock right here, weren't they? He didn't bother to reprimand him, both he and Thundercracker were very accustomed to the high whining buzz of Skywarp's blaster.

Most of the humans were sensible enough to take one look at the Decepticons, hear the shrieking alarms, and rapidly evacuate. Cowardly, maybe, but in Starscream's experience, cowards tended to _live_ and heroes - _**crunch**_, went Thundercracker's foot when he stepped around one human - heroes got _stepped on_.

...Yes, well, that happened sometimes, didn't it, when the natives were smaller than petrorabbits and only half as clever. Constantly underfoot. Squishy. Messy, too.

There was a pause.

"..._Euwww_," said Skywarp, with feeling.

"I didn't do it _on purpose,_" Thundercracker said, ignoring the loud ping ping of bullets slamming ineffectively into his armour to examine his own foot with a nebulously disturbed expression.

Starscream followed his gaze and pulled a face. When it hit the air, the fluid that carried oxygen around the humans' bodies went bright, bright red, and as it dried it darkened. It was a phenomenon that Starscream was aware of and which he understood intellectually. But because the organic creatures used iron in the process, it dried looking an awful lot like a severe rust infection.

Already, his sensor suite was nervously questioning Thundercracker's state of repair and assessing his relative infection risk.

The sight it made was disquieting on more than one level.

"Wash that off," Starscream barked, and looked purposefully away.

"There isn't anywhere to clean up here," said Thundercracker patiently. "I'll get it when we get back."

Easy for Thundercracker to say - his diagnostics would be able to tell him nothing was wrong internally. To Starscream and Skywarp, however, he looked -

"Gross," Skywarp said, even as he topped off a cube and set it on his modest stack.

Yes, exactly that.

The soft, welcoming pink light of the energon cubes all stacked neatly next to the syphons made a dull but warm glow against the textured metal floors and scuffed walls. It shone on Skywarp's dark-painted plating. This energon was of a very low grade, the kind used for fuelling machinery and weapons more than for giving to mechs. It would need refining before they used it - but even so, it was clean of the impurities one saw in the energon recycled from permanently offline mechs.

There was some obscure little protocol in Starscream's processor, buried deep but hard to root out, that made him feel better when he knew that there was fresh energon nearby. Starscream had a well developed sense of his own immediate preservation, and he liked to feel that there was energon to be had, should he need it.

Given how short handed they were on this particular raid, Starscream did deign to join in filling cubes. There were, he thought cynically, unlikely to be many of them to fill anyway. At least it would be over shortly, and then he'd get back to his dro-

Soundwave's ping was tagged 'urgent'. [_Autobots en route. ETA: two hundred and forty astroseconds. Recommendation: retreat.]_

__

"_What?_" squawked Starscream aloud. The rain was thunderous, and it interfered with not just his navigational suite but also his audial sensors. He re-calibrated them again, pausing in his concentration to try to listen more closely. If they were that close, he should be able to -

__

Oh.

__

Outside, just audible beneath the sheeting rain and howling of the humans' infernal alarms, he heard the rumble and hum of - something. Something _big_.

__

The Autobots were coming.

__

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know it _looks_ like a cliffhanger but nobody faces any consequences for anything in G1 and they're not about to start in this fic.
> 
> If you liked something about this chapter, or this fic in general, please feel free to to let me know in a comment and have a good morning!


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Starscream has a bad day and everything is Megatron's fault, including the decisions Starscream makes all on his own, which are, like, ESPECIALLY Megatron's fault.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is a bit of a mess because I hate, and also kind of suck at, writing action sequences. But it's done! *confetti* I can only hope that it is also, like, uhhhh, you know, comprehensible.

"Retreat!" he cried, making the choice to trust Soundwave's judgement on this. If Soundwave was recommending retreat, it meant that Starscream probably would have ordered it a joor ago.

Three light-armoured seekers stood a good chance of out-manoeuvring a bunch of heavy grounders, but fighting them off? Not so much. Especially since, now that he was paying attention and less prepared to dismiss it as a product of the disgustingly wet thunderstorm, Starscream was fairly certain he could pick out the sounds of a heavy duty truck engine rumbling closer.

_That_ was a noise good little Decepticons heard only in their nightmares.

Unfortunately, in this case, 'retreat' still meant 'load up and flee,' because the energon was critically necessary to operations. Which meant – 

Starscream's instincts, and every process for self-preservation that he had (which were… numerous, despite occasional mishaps), all shrieked that he should be the one to flee with their energon and that Thundercracker and Skywarp should cover his retreat like the relatively disposable metal shields they so clearly were. 

But Skywarp had both a greater carrying capacity and a better shot at getting away. 

Short distance warping would mean that the extra weight of the energon cubes would offer his pursuers no advantage in speed, and with Starscream and Thundercracker covering, he would have a better chance of getting their supplies back to base by – Starscream’s processor started running probabilities before he’d even finished contemplating it – nearly a third.

And Starscream was a better evasive flier. Starscream was a better evasive flier than _ anyone._

He imagined what Megatron would say if he returned, unscathed, without his trine mates. Not that Megatron’s opinion mattered more than _his own functioning_, no matter what that giant oaf thought –

Starscream hesitated, but only for a moment. He didn’t have any longer than that to make the choice. 

Surely he and Thundercracker together could out-fly some _Autobots._ The Aerialbots, if they were even out there, were nothing but babies.

It just… sounded like rather a _lot_ of Autobots, was all.

…If it came down to it, he could still throw Thundercracker at them and flee, anyway. 

Starscream clenched his jaw until the cables ached under the tension. He shoved the last cube that would fit inside Skywarp's cockpit inside, then slammed it shut.

"Go!" he hissed.

Skywarp squawked at the rough treatment, but he was gone barely an astrosecond later, disappearing with the soft but distinctive noise of a warp drive coming online.

Starscream jammed his own subspace full of as many cubes as would not slow him unforgivably, and let Thundercracker do the same. He snarled at the remaining cubes – six of them, but they couldn't risk loading too heavily, or they really would get caught.

As Thundercracker transformed and Starscream's combat protocols primed themselves in response to his emotional state – a mix of fear, anticipation, spite and fury – he grabbed one of the remaining ones to lob at Optimus Prime's stupid slagging face.

Luckily, Starscream had excellent aim and energon was very volatile. 

Somewhat less luckily, he had underestimated just how poor an idea it might be to hurl volatile explosives around an active power plant – especially one where half the internal safety measures had been compromised by the Decepticons showing up to collect. 

The resulting explosion was huge: a wash of flame and heat, a burst of light that made his visual feed cycle through a series of rapid adjustments. The concussive force of it streamed debris, organic and otherwise, in a blistering wind around them and made the rain sizzle on his plating. 

Starscream heard Optimus Prime cry out in pain, and he laughed as he transformed and launched, using the sudden burst of light, heat, smoke and steam to cover the manoeuvre. Thundercracker fell in. 

The fire in the power plant below spread fast, lighting up stores of fuels and chemicals with a cracks and pops and booms. The buildings buckled and crumpled and fell, leaving behind strange, skeletal spires and angles as pieces toppled away with every new bang and crash. 

The fire also sent up billowing black clouds that left them flying blind, but with the Autobots below howling about human evacuation and poisons, Starscream was willing to take that as a victory. 

“_That _should keep them busy,” he sneered, and didn’t bother even trying to find them in this mess. 

The rain and the thunder and lightning, combined with the smoke and the yelling, only added to the nonsense data his navigational suite was spitting out. 

Thundercracker was already turning – he could sense _him,_ even if he couldn’t read anything else, and there were still the radio beacons the humans used. He hadn’t seen any of the Autobots’ few true fliers in the team below, so the skies should be clear. It would be fine for one more flight back to the Victory. 

“Let’s get out of here before they remember, then,” Thundercracker said, reasonably but warily.

Starscream agreed. Before he’d set the quaint human buildings on fire, he’d noticed flashes of gold and red paint, at least _someone_ who was an ugly black and white, a bright red he was pretty sure only Ironhide wore – Fighting was all well and good, but he wasn’t idiot enough to try to face that lot with just Thundercracker. 

He began to respond, and then –

“And where do you think _you’re_ going, huh?” cried a voice.

Someone smashed into him, sending him spinning wildly in the air.

Thunder roared against the howling wind, and then the sudden weight of one of those insane front liners that the Autobots kept fielding (despite all the _mounting evidence_ that neither one of them could compose and sustain a _stable reality matrix_) slammed into him from – from above – because they must have used the storm winds to their advantage somehow, or – 

The addition of an entire sports car of metal slamming into him in flight threw him terribly off balance.

Starscream experienced just a moment of static, and heard a gleeful whoop from the deranged Autobot clinging to his wing, and then the crunch of metal – his own, light frame, crumpling under the strain – drowned out the shriek of Starscream's own stressed vocaliser. 

His systems screeched and screebled. He knew he was losing altitude, fast, trying desperately to compensate for the sudden weight of an entire car. There was a moment when a flash lit up his optics, but he couldn’t even see anything with his visual feed but black smoke and sheeting rain –

His scrambled navigational data delivered several errors and absolutely no meaningful information.

Starscream jerked, his turbines whirled and whined, his engine snarled unpredictably. He’d lost a lot of altitude, but it was instinct to pick whatever seemed like the nearest clear bearing, fire his thrusters and smash through the sound barrier to fling the Autobot off with sheer speed and momentum. 

Except – it wasn't a clear bearing. The rain and the smoke and navigational interference conspired, and in another surreal flash of light, all Starscream could see was an _oncoming cliff face._

_Had that always been there?_ he wondered internally, inanely, blankly. 

“Starscream!” he heard Thundercracker bellow from somewhere above – somewhere much _farther above_ than he’d thought he’d fallen from! 

Atop him, the Autobot's wild whooping – at the rush of going faster than his pathetic little ground mode could ever possibly dream of on his own – turned abruptly into a wild shout of shock and fear, and something that might actually have been Starscream's name.

The noise was lost to the roar of thunder, but a moment later someone else was screaming too, far below them both, howling, “Sideswipe, no!” 

They were all screaming then, and Starscream banked, hard – but there was no way to lose all his momentum fast enough to avoid collision entirely.

He rolled hard instead, adjusting his antigravs for a manoeuvre that Earth jets were just categorically not designed for, and when they did meet the cliff, he made sure Sideswipe hit it first – followed by about twenty tonnes of hysterically shrieking jet.

They slammed into the rock with an almighty crash. 

The collision hurt. 

Starscream's engine sputtered unhappily, and something low in his frame definitely fractured and began to leak. His cockpit cracked, right through the reinforced glass, where one of Sideswipe's hard edges rammed into it. The sudden sizzle of fuel told him something had dislocated, possibly the mechanism that injected fuel through his engine to throw him into his top speeds.

His yelling dissolved into crackles and static and high screechy whines. Then, as rock tumbled around both of them, his voice glitched out completely with an ominous _crack_.

Silent now, he could hear the Autobot vehicle howling at the top of his voice, louder, for a split second, than even the storm winds were in his audial pickup.

Starscream lurched away in a confusing rain of broken rock, black smoke and sluicing water. For a few hideous seconds gravity exerted a tremendous, irresistible force upon his frame and he dropped even further. 

He managed to figure out which way was up and how to go there again.

Behind him, Sideswipe began to move, but he halted abruptly at the distinctive shriek of tortured metal. 

Starscream's processor reeled, buzzing, dazzled with light and the enormous influx of damage report data, but his chemoreceptors could pick up the smell of energon even through the storm and smoke.

"Starscream!" Thundercracker yelled again over the noise, and although Starscream's audials weren't designed for directional hearing, with it came a ping. He turned toward it and flew blindly. He thought it was one of the Aerialbots who gave an aborted yelp and dove out of his way, but it was hard to say within the mess of his sensors.

_Someone_ shot at him. Luckily, whoever it was found his aim just as obstructed by the cover of the storm and the fire as everything else was.

“Skywarp called for backup,” Thundercracker reported, which – Starscream hadn’t seen that, or noticed it on general comms, so that meant there were damage reports that he wasn’t even getting anymore.

“Good,” Starscream grunted, firing blindly in a direction that he judged to be ‘Not At Thundercracker’, which he figured was about as good a shot as anybody was in this mess. Someone yelped, down below, but he had no concept of who or if it was even in response to his null ray’s discharge.

In fact, half of Starscream’s sensory suite was glitching, providing only fantastical nonsense. His navigation had just dropped out entirely. 

But he was still dead certain that the crash had hurt that stupid Autobot more than it had hurt him. Maybe it'd teach them to think twice about tackling a jet in mid air…!

Thundercracker's guns were loud and familiar. He let himself be guided through the morass of scrap data by the ping he'd sent, drifting closer and firing away, and felt more confident as the sound of them got louder.

He had to reassess his initial assumptions – he should have made sure _he_ was the one who went back to base, safe and sound. What had he been _thinking_? If Skywarp had gotten distracted chasing organics or something equally stupid, Starscream was going to cut his wings off with a laser knife.

Far below, someone screamed across the field: "It's Megatron!"

_Not likely_, thought Starscream cynically, although it was a fantastic bluff – what _had_ they done when they’d called for backup? 

Distantly, he heard Soundwave's voice drone out, "Ravage: eject," and then –

Crashing. Yelling. Oh, he thought. It _wasn't_ a bluff?

"Left!" Thundercracker bellowed, and Starscream banked hard without hesitation, listening to the spiteful buzz of someone's shot sailing past his right wing. He rebooted his sensors again and finally got visual data back online. He could see some of the field now, and what he could see, he could _shoot._

Megatron _was_ down there, bafflingly. How had Skywarp convinced him to cover their retreat? Skywarp had a hard time convincing his own trine mates that it was wet outside the ship.

Megatron's broad, silvery back made a tempting target amid the chaos, vulnerable to Starscream while he exchanged titanic, mud-spattering, ground-shaking blows with Prime down in the rain and the smoke. Steam leaked from the seams of their armour as they engaged, and above the energon and organic filth Starscream could smell hot metal.

"Screamer?" said Thundercracker quietly. They weren't being shot at right that second, but it was only a matter of time. The Autobots had plenty of reinforcements to call, and at least one of the Aerialbots was already on the field. Starscream couldn’t see him, but he was sure he’d heard him earlier.

Nearby, Starscream heard Astrotrain give a particularly ugly grunt of pain and saw he’d fallen afoul of one of Jazz’s sonic attacks and was staggering away through the haze, energon leaking from his face. It was Breakdown who distracted Jazz then, engine growling as he waded into melee range.

Half the Victory’s combatants must have been out here.

What was Megatron even _doing_ out here? 

They couldn't afford to get into a combiner battle over eighty-six astrolitres of energon!

And – and Starscream had _had it under control_! What was Megatron trying to _do? _

Was he just here to make Starscream look _incompetent_? He'd give him a piece of his processor about this ridiculous interference later, that was certain.

"Our _mighty leader_," he said with heavy irony, "has chosen to –" 

He stopped. His voice was still entirely crackles and static. How annoying.

Starscream booted it again. "He's covering our-"

Nothing.

"Screamer?"

Starscream let his engine make the frustrated growl that his voice apparently could not, and turned laboriously.

He shot a blast at Jazz on his way out – which was dodged, quickly and neatly and apparently without effort – distracting him from Ravage's creeping approach from behind, and then he disengaged entirely.

Megatron, in all his dubious wisdom, had chosen to show up and cover Starscream’s retreat, so retreat Starscream would. And if by some fluke Megatron didn’t come back? Well. _Good_. It would serve that fool right.

Thundercracker set an absurdly slow pace home once they were clear. Starscream limped along beside him and made only the most token protest, which came out as static anyway. 

The tower of the ship rose to meet them at Thundercracker's comm code – not Starscream's, because his wouldn't transmit clearly. It rose up with the grind and creak of strained metal. It had, like much of the ship, been exposed to more salt water than was probably wise. They descended for a semi-controlled landing, which made an echoing crash as Starscream landed badly.

At least when Megatron emptied half the base to _interfere with Starscream’s raid_, he didn’t leave anyone behind to witness Starscream limping in to land and scraping his damaged parts against the floor.

One of Starscream's legs wobbled as he transformed and it was suddenly needed to take his weight. Thundercracker's arm shot out to grab him. He steadied uncertainly. 

On the other wing, he was mildly surprised that the transformation had gone so smoothly at all. Starscream loved flying, but he hated being stuck in alt mode. Opposable thumbs made a lot of tasks easier; if you couldn't fly, being a jet made it harder to get anything done.

"I've got you," said Thundercracker, which… explained his grip. His fingers were hooked firmly through one transformation seam, holding him steady, and he was pulling back, setting his weight against Starscream's listing bulk.

He straightened carefully, testing how far he could trust his weight distribution in robot mode, but it was far enough. He pushed Thundercracker away. One little crash and now apparently his trine mate thought he was an invalid.

"See to your own injuries," he snarled. It emerged as incomprehensible static.

One of his wings dragged on the wall with a high and dissonant scraping. It took Starscream a moment to determine what the noise was – the sensation was mostly lost among the barrage of system errors that he was still discarding in batches.

"We're both going to the repair bay," Thundercracker soothed, with an air of patience that just made Starscream even more annoyed – at the raid, at Thundercrakcer, at Optimus Prime, at the whole situation, at the injuries and the pit-spawned errors that wouldn't stop cluttering up his readouts – and definitely, overwhelmingly, at _Megatron_.

"Auto-repair will fix it," he decided, and even though his actual statement was incomprehensible his natural contrariness must either have been very clear in his frame or just entirely predictable to Thundercracker, because his trine mate called his name in increasingly concerned repetitions as he turned and stalked – or, okay, staggered – away. 

Thundercracker's voice echoed off the walls behind him. He ignored it.

He went to the labs instead of his quarters, because Thundercracker had the codes to his rooms. The lab would only unlock for someone who outranked him – Megatron, who never bothered when he could just demand Starscream come to him, or situationally Hook, who... might bother, depending on how Thundercracker sold him on Starscream's injuries. Hook had an enormous, only-partially-deserved ego. He didn't go to mechs – they came to him.

And he had enough of a sense of self preservation, Starscream thought, that he wouldn't try to pull rank on Starscream without a very, very good reason. This wasn't it.

Starscream's damage, when the door swooshed gently closed behind him and he took the time to assess it, was not so severe that it would require immediate intervention. That meant that, given enough time, his auto-repair systems would take care of it. Auto-repair was glacially slow, but it was reliable. 

For a moment he indulged himself with the idea that he might be able to actually leave this to his nanites, no repair bay visits needed, but he knew it wasn't practical. He had too much to do. Even if he hadn't been needed in a command role – which, clearly, he was, because like _pit_ could Megatron run this army at even half efficiency without him – the minor dislocation he'd discovered in his wing would take at least five or six light-dark cycles on this disgusting little planet to fix itself.

That would make _Skywarp_ the ranking officer for the whole Decepticon air corps during that time. A cold shudder worked its way from Starscream's laser core to the tips of his wings. No.

They couldn't let Skywarp be the ranking officer on basic _scouting flights_ for that long, let alone anything more complicated.

The ship creaked gently with the currents under water, dark and cold inside and out. Its mechanisms hummed and throbbed softly all around and for a second it still seemed too quiet to Starscream's senses, at violent odds with the cacophony inside his helm.

He swore aloud. It emerged in a burst of indecipherable clicks and whines, liberally interrupted by crackling. His vocal components were busted – or, worse, maybe even his language centres. His comms hadn't worked very well either, if he thought about it. If he left that up to his auto-repair... the complex pieces might take a vorn to recover. Which wasn't necessarily to say that the self-aggrandising sadists in the repair bay would fix a 'non-essential' component much faster – or that Megatron wouldn't indulge their indiscipline at Starscream's expense for sheer amusement's sake.

He turned with a snarl and kicked a table leg. It sent a painful shock vibrating up his leg, and his voice cracked even louder with more static.

Starscream put his foot back down and balanced against the other table, watching the ugly sag of the one he'd just whacked. Clearly he just... needed stronger furniture. What was the point of a table if it couldn't put up with a little abuse now and then?

He let the still noises of the ship happen around him for a few long moments while his fans slowed. Wrecking his laboratory wasn't going to help anything, least of all his self repair.

Really, this was all Megatron's fault anyway.

Who ordered a raid on that particular target? Megatron. Who had decided he was too good to lead a small-scale raid? Megatron. Who had casually assigned it to Starscream instead, like a punishment duty for an _imaginary_ infraction? Yes. _Megatron._

Starscream's engine was thundering unpleasantly below his laser core by the time his processor had finished this chain of thoughts and feverish feelings. His fuel pump chugged gamely along, sending necessary resources to his other systems, most of which flicked smoothly online in response to his emotional state. His weapons systems slipped from standby to combat imminent without his conscious permission.

And then, oh, and then. Megatron had been, just, **so** ready to come and provide backup, hadn't he? To cover Starscream's _ignominious retreat_ from his disastrously under-resourced raid – as though coming to assist Starscream was ever a thing Megatron might do without more than one motive.

Starscream, contemplating this and feeling _pretty motivated himself_, glanced over his wing to look at the half-finished drone on the table. Seeing the repair bay – and therefore facing what they all diplomatically pretended was Hook's personality instead of a persistent glitch in his self-assessment values – could wait a few joors while he did some work. It would be soothing to bury his processor in a little plot.

He smiled. By the time Starscream was finished, the drone's weapons systems would be truly worthy of _mighty Megatron_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope... Starscream calms down... at some point...? 
> 
> Thanks for reading, if you liked something about this chapter please feel free to leave me a comment and let me know. :)


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there is an Official Decepticon Staff Meeting™

He lost the rest of the light part of the planet's cycle to mechanics. The Victory was too deep underwater for the light to penetrate, so the planetary cycle mostly went unremarked and unnoticed there. Even if it hadn't been, Starscream's laboratory was a converted room deep in the belly of the ship, and he didn't have portholes. He only knew the time if he bothered to check his internal chronometer. He did not.

Engineering was not his speciality, but he knew more than enough to construct a drone capable of annihilating someone – even if that someone was Megatron, whose huge, solid frame was uniquely durable. Now, with the majority of his processor finally available for the task, he moved even faster. 

Several of his systems were out of order, but he didn't need them for this work, and he could compensate enough to make his damaged depth perception irrelevant.

And... maybe if he paid attention to the work and therefore didn't have to think about his humiliating retreat and catastrophic raid, the sick roiling in his fuel tanks would sort itself out by the time he had to demand Skywarp's report on how much energon they'd actually accrued.

The drone's plating smoothed under Starscream's increasingly shaky fingers as the joors drifted by. He heard, distantly, the sounds from the Victory that indicated the others had returned again -- voices, deep and raucous, muffled by corridors and layers of steel, the thump of someone getting slammed into a wall, the steady hum of power use increasing as the ship supported more mechs.

Pings to his comm went ignored, muted if they weren't flagged 'urgent' or 'emergency'. The world smelled like hot metal, burnt wires and acrid chemistry. The drone's big frame ate up his time and his skill and, also, the power generated by the core he had salvaged from the desert fortress, until finally its bulk was big enough and sturdy enough to support the laser cannons with which he equipped it. He was dreamily stuffing it with salvaged antigrav technology, which he thought he'd more or less repaired to functionality, when Soundwave's third comm failed to reach him. 

Soundwave's comms were flagged neither 'urgent' nor 'emergency'. They were rather a desultory little bit of bureaucratic nonsense flagged 'priority'. Soundwave, having made the requisite effort on his own behalf, and presumably being harried by their _grand leader_ himself, had shunted the problem to Megatron and gotten on with his life. Technically, Starscream outranked him: it wasn't Soundwave's role to enforce compliance.

This was lucky, as it would have been a full time job all on its own and Soundwave was a busy mech. 

Megatron's comm, on the other wing, came through loud and clear, because he had no problem ignoring protocol and flagging his every whim under 'urgent' without regard for paltry concerns like practicality or actual urgency.

To be fair to this system, Megatron's comms usually _became_ quite urgent for their intended recipient, especially if they went unanswered. Starscream was… familiar with that experience.

[Did you resign from your post while I was covering your craven, poorly-planned retreat, _mission leader Starscream_?] 

Starscream knocked over a micro-etched coil and had to lunge over the table just to prevent it from hitting the floor and breaking.

[What?] he sent back, sprawled over one of his drone's thick legs. Predictably the characters he was trying to send became a corrupted mess as soon as they hit his comm line. He scowled down at the delicate little coil he'd rescued. It was fine.

There was a long pause. 

[Your comms are out. What a _shame_.] Megatron sent, in a tone indicating that he did not find it very much of a shame at all. [Repairs will have to wait, Starscream.] A beacon beeped insistently – the location for a meeting. 

Megatron despised actually conducting meetings with his full senior staff. He usually preferred to yell orders from the command centre and shoot anybody who didn’t immediately hop to it obediently (which, when not applied to himself, was a management style Starscream wholly approved of) so the call to a meeting, especially a postmortem like this one, usually meant that something had gone catastrophically wrong – and that whatever was about to hit the fan would not be distributed evenly.

And Starscream was already late.

Also, he couldn't talk.

"Starscream! Did you get into a fight with a _trash compactor_?" Rumble asked loudly upon his arrival at the location Megatron had so peremptorily indicated.

It was a room barely big enough to contain the command staff, dominated by a huge, battered, sturdy metal table, which was still slightly dented from the last time Megatron had slammed a mech into it. If he tilted his head Starscream could still see the imprint of Blast Off's cranial plating.

"Rumble. Frenzy. Return," said Soundwave from somewhere deeper in the shadows of the room. Wise of him, of course, because being mute and damaged certainly didn't make Starscream any more _harmless_ than usual.

"Well," said Megatron, and the door slid shut behind him – and it was automated, wasn't it, so there was no reason for it to sound so _ominous_ in Starscream's audial pickup – "Now that all of you have _troubled_ yourselves to show up, perhaps we can get underway."

‘All of you’ in this case, consisted of Starscream, Onslaught and Motormaster, Thundercracker, Skywarp, and Soundwave. 

Skywarp in particular looked like he wanted to be asleep. This wasn't strictly odd: Skywarp didn't do well in any setting where he was required to be still or quiet or, worse, both. It was just that when Skywarp was bored, he could become a little... creative.

Between Skywarp and Megatron's glowering presence, Starscream was suddenly regretting not going to the repair bay -- and not just because in the absence of something more compelling to concentrate on, his injuries hurt. The Constructicons were conspicuous by their absence in this meeting, meaning that they were busy repairing the mechs who’d been damaged. 

Starscream might not have been required to attend an officers' meeting if he was in the middle of repairs.

Of course, letting Megatron conduct important business without being present for it could _also_ be a mistake...

"Well, Starscream?" drawled Megatron nastily, making everyone glance briefly at Starscream before their attention swung, like a metronome, back to the biggest and angriest threat in the room.

There was a restless and expectant silence. Motormaster's engine changed pitch, impatient and a little apprehensive. The rest of the officers present were older, too experienced to let it show.

Megatron waited. His smile was mean and his optics ungenerous.

Brute. 

Starscream's vocal components ached with the urge to spit all his resentment and spite right at his face. This was probably his idea of a _grand_ joke. 

"What’s that?” Megatron prompted, solicitously. “Nothing to say?"

Starscream remained silent. He glared fiercely.

"How _novel_. I'll start then, shall I?" And with that deeply disingenuous beginning, he began: "This raid was poorly planned and badly executed, and the quantity of energon we retrieved is ten units less than was expended on the whole botched exercise."

Starscream, who had been itching to refute both 'poorly planned' and 'badly executed', spat out a startled curse. It emerged as a short blat of static. 

He felt Onslaught's ever-hostile gaze turn on him for a moment, but he ignored it. They'd _lost_ energon on the raid! He'd known Megatron showing up in all his ridiculous _state_ to ostentatiously cover Starscream's retreat was poorly planned, but he hadn't realised just how bad it had been.

"Explain to me," Megatron snarled, leaning forward and slamming his huge hands onto the flat surface of the table between them, "why I shouldn't _scrap_ every last one of you and begin again with officers whose basic competence exceeds that of a pack of _glitched cybercats_!"

The silence was thunderous.

And... long.

Even Onslaught and Motormaster, neither of whom had been involved in any part of the raid except in their capacity as backup, were still and quiet. Thundercracker appeared to be studying the helm-shaped dent between Megatron's hands very intently.

This, of course, was usually the point in a meeting at which Starscream could be relied upon to launch a counter-argument. More than one set of optics flicked in his direction expectantly. 

He wanted to talk now, too. He wanted to inform Megatron -- and everyone else in screeching range, if he was honest -- in _no uncertain terms_ that they would have been at least eighty itres _up_ had Megatron not felt the need to interfere in Starscream's raid. 

But of course, he could say nothing.

...He doubted Megatron's patience would be equal to waiting for him to write it out.

The silence dragged until Starscream could hear the creak of the table beneath Megatron's fat black fingers. That was the sound of impending violence, and if no other target presented itself, it would definitely be Starscream's innocent frame taking the brunt of Megatron's temper. He'd been in charge of the raid, after all.

"Skywarp," he muttered, but the hiss of static didn't catch his attention. Instead Starscream had to list sideways and kick him.

Clank.

"Ow!" yelped Skywarp, loudly enough to attract everyone's attention.

Starscream focused very hard on looking like he'd had nothing to do with it.

"Have you something to say, Skywarp?" Megatron had a way of saying a mech's designation that made it sound like the very worst kind of insult.

"No!" Skywarp blurted, and then he seemed to take stock of the narrowing of Megatron's optics, and then Starscream could almost see him computing: the fact that _he_ had also been on the mission, and that Starscream couldn't speak, and that, most importantly, Megatron's terrible gaze was locked on him like targeting software. 

Starscream leaned back in his seat and let his wings tick out, only a little relaxed but entirely satisfied. Someone might still get slammed through the table, but it wasn't going to be _him._

"Uh, wait, wait..." Skywarp went on, rapidly coming to terms with his circumstances, "That is... uh, sir... I think... it is..."

It was so nice to see someone else scrambling to answer Megatron's unreasonable demands. 

"...it is definitely Soundwave's fault," Skywarp got out.

Starscream's pleasure at Skywarp's discomfort morphed into uneasiness so fast it felt like plummeting from orbit.

There was a long pause. Around them all, the ship creaked softly. So did Thundercracker, when he wisely inched away from Skywarp.

There was not even the smallest telltale twitch from Soundwave's direction, but Starscream could feel the quality of his stillness... _change_.

"Go on," said Megatron, in a tone of dark and hostile indulgence.

_Stupid_ Skywarp. Everyone knew Soundwave was Megatron's favourite.

"Well, how come we didn't know there'd be Autobots there? Our wing scouts the place, and then we give the data to Soundwave, don't we? How come he didn't say, uh, say anything about that being a risk?"

Starscream wanted to sigh. _Stupid_ Skywarp.

It was true that the briefing Starscream had received, and on which he based his raid plan, had contained no mention of an Autobot presence. But there was also no way in the pit that Skywarp had taken the time to read the twelve-thousand character briefing. His choice of criticism was based entirely on what he had observed of Starscream's plan, and what his own assessment suggested Starscream must have known. His faith might have warmed the cold crackly cockles of Starscream’s laser core if it hadn’t also reminded him so starkly of why they always _questioned Skywarp's terrible judgement_.

Starscream wasn't above sabotaging his own raids if it suited him, and everyone – everyone _else_, anyway – at the table certainly knew it.

Historically, Megatron had had very little patience with 'bad intel' as an excuse. He _never_ let it slide when Starscream used it to excuse all manner of, ah, fortuitous accidents regarding Megatron's welfare. Again, clear favouritism at work...

There was a short, unfriendly pause.

"Well, Soundwave?" Megatron said softly.

Soundwave's voice came out in its usual smooth drone. "Analysis provided no indication of Autobots interest in the target," he said. “Suggestion: information leaked.”

Aaaaaand then the optics in the room swung around again, and they were all right back to looking at Starscream.

Starscream's optics flickered. He said nothing.

"Find out," Megatron said shortly, staring right at Starscream.

Soundwave inclined his head.

"Showing up to a meeting injured isn't going to win you enough sympathy to keep you _functioning_ if there is evidence to suggest you were behind this, Starscream," Megatron warned in his deep, rumbling voice.

Indignation rose in Starscream, flickering in lightning-fast little signals through all his functioning internal processes. He hadn't leaked anything! Was this the kind of treatment he got for _not_ committing treason? Baseless suspicions and accusations? 

Starscream huffed an annoyed vent. If this was the reward for loyalty it was no wonder he never bothered.

"Very well," Megatron said, with his narrowed, unfriendly optics still fixed on Starscream. "Dismissed. Starscream, report to the repair bay and get that stupid glitch fixed."

As if he needed Megatron to tell him that! Starscream tipped his chin back and sneered expressively. 

Megatron's stony expression did not reveal whether or not he even noticed. "I expect your report on this raid within the cycle," he said flatly.

One of Starscream's wings gave a violent twitch. 

* * *

The repair bay was cold, busy and full of Constructicons. Scrapper was elbow-deep in Astrotrain's insides when Starscream finally reported, escorted by Skywarp. He thought that Skywarp was not so much escorting him to enforce compliance with Megatron's command, but more to get away from Soundwave's blank (but somehow yet judgemental) stare.

"What a shame," Hook said in condescending and absolutely insincere tones of conciliation, some time later, "these parts aren't standard. We'll take the replacement specs from your blueprints on file, but we'll need time to fabricate them."

Starscream stared at him in mute rage. 

Oh, they'd had all the time in the world to fix his navigational systems, and had even had on hand (courtesy of Mixmaster) the nanite-heavy glue to repair the crack in his cockpit. They'd put in a new optic entirely without dithering about it.

But the components for his language centre were mysteriously unavailable and had to be _individually fabricated_?

Did they take Starscream for a fool?

He bared his teeth and let his power distribution system reroute a flood of energon to his weapons systems, which hummed softly to life. His fans spun up in response to the sudden warmth of a rapidly heating null ray.

Some things did not require language to come across _loud and clear_.

"Now, now," Hook said, lifting his hands placatingly. "Processor repairs are always tricky – it's not as though it's just your vocals that's been damaged. You wouldn't want sub-par parts in your processor, would you?"

No, of course that wasn't what Starscream wanted – but he didn't want ludicrous excuses, either! 

He was, cynically, very certain that he was being lied to. They could repair him, he was sure of it. They'd just chosen to leave him hanging for a few days. To undermine him. To _humiliate_ him. Starscream snarled static.

He would remember this. And when Megatron was out of the way – as he would be, only too soon – they would regret putting him through this nonsense. He'd make sure of it.

"Commander, please," said Hook in his oily way, which made Starscream realise that some part of his thought process must have been visible on his face, "it's not our procedure to rip processor components out of other mechs –" one of Starscream's wings twitched suspiciously "– and we don't have the parts on hand. It's a lucky thing we don't have to go back to Cybertron to get them – and," he added, with a hint of slyness, "if it wasn't for the parts so recently salvaged from the desert fortress and given to use in the repair bay," here, he spread his hands as though helpless, "we might have been in real trouble."

The reference to Starscream's recent contributions to the repair bay's supplies was a transparent attempt at flattery and manipulation. Hook's assumption that Starscream might somehow not _notice_ his ego being pandered to thusly was patronising beyond belief.

...Which was about what Starscream expected, from Hook.

It didn't make him feel less cynical or suspicious, and it did not change his nebulous plans to put the whole over-favoured combiner team firmly in their place just as soon as he could be assured that Megatron would not be around to undermine his authority in doing it.

But he allowed it to mollify his temper temporarily. Let Hook think Starscream was so easily placated, despite this fresh indignity. Let him think he was _safe_.

Starscream's armour settled and smoothed almost as soon as he had decided not to argue about it right now. Hook's slow huff of warm air, expelled through his vents to be sensed by the fine-tuned machinery in Starscream's wings, indicated that he was responding to Starscream with a lessening of his own tension.

"I'm so glad you're willing to be reasonable about this, Starscream," he simpered. "There's really no comparison when one is used to serving less _reasonable_ masters..."

That was true enough. He couldn't imagine Megatron pretending to be even half as understanding as this.

Starscream took up his pad and stylus. [TIMELINE] he demanded in quick, spiky characters, drawing them out painstakingly. They looked subtly wonky.

"Oh. Hmm..."

Hook turned to glance at Scrapper, who seemed to infer that he was being looked at without actually having to turn or see what was going on. He grunted in a way that could have meant anything, and Hook cocked his head like he heard real language in that noise. 

Starscream was not privy to what went on across the private links between members of combiner teams, and most of the time he did not want to be. Right then, though, he found it very irritating.

"Fifty joors?" Hook said, turning back. "Forty five, perhaps? You can't rush these things, you know."

Starscream's engine growled, but looking between the two of them, he was fairly sure that there wasn't going to be any profitable bargaining on the time line. Nobody had died during the raid, so there was no arguing that they should have spare parts available. And as suspicious as Starscream felt about it, he had no proof that they _didn't_ need that kind of manufacturing time. He couldn't push them much harder without running into the wall of his own ignorance on the topic, and then he'd risk looking stupid.

Looking stupid was to be avoided at all costs, since it would only undermine him faster. Better to look magnanimous and, as Hook said, reasonable. It was even more suspect, he thought sourly, that they'd handed him that angle on a platter.

He eyed Hook. "Very well," he said, utterly incomprehensible.

There was nothing for it. He'd have repairs could be completed now and then return to his lab. He doubted Megatron was going to allow a delay on his report just for some inconsequential injury to the part of his processor that made reporting possible, so he would have to write it on a pad in long form characters. Vile.

Starscream's other frame repairs settled rapidly, and he only had to remain in the repair bay for a few breems more. 

This was good because Astrotrain was laying flat on a slab and _his_ repairs included a fuel tank surgery that looked both grizzly and agonising to watch. Some part of it had evidently been crushed by... something. Experience suggested perhaps a sonic weapon, because the dark grey plating over the tank seemed oddly intact. Starscream did have a dim and partially-corrupted memory file of seeing him limp away from Jazz in the earlier fight.

From where Starscream was sitting, perched on one end of a repair berth (slowly trying to write out the skeleton of his report with a stylus like some kind of savage) he could not quite avoid seeing what was going on with his newly-repaired optics. And since that included the grim spectacle of Scrapper syphoning out the energon in Astrotrin's tanks and then ferreting around through the gaping wound to dig up shards, that was sort of... regrettable.

Astrotrain kept making the most aggrieved noises about it, too, but nobody had muted him. In fact, they kept making him report sensory feedback and new error codes to them as they went.

Starscream had experienced more than a few agonising repair sessions himself, but there was something about watching another mech undergo it...

Astrotrain's wings clattered against the repair berth as he shook in an effort to hold still for Scrapper's clever questing fingers. Starscream tapped his stylus on his datapad, losing track again of his train of thought. He was supposed to be justifying his raid plan with reference to the brief, but the glossy sheen of Astrotrain's energon slowly filling up a container on the table was distracting him.

He returned to writing. The good news was: his raid plan was perfectly justifiable, especially if he couched his unusually small team in terms of energon efficiency and not just his own unwillingness to take any boring slow ground vehicles along on the flight. Bad news: Megatron might not _care_ about what was and was not justifiable. Megatron was not always, or even often, a superior officer who felt himself beholden to good sense or reason.

It would depend, too, on what Soundwave dug up in his search for leaks flowing from the Decepticons to the Autobots – and he was likely to find _something_. He was well motivated, given that if he turned up nothing at all, he could rely on Starscream to emphasise the 'bad intel' as the primary reason their raid went off the rails. Megatron had already dignified the possibility of bad intel with investigation by taking Skywarp's allegation at all seriously, so it was fair game now.

To put it bluntly: they all knew _someone_ was going to pay for the disaster this raid had turned out to be, and blaming Soundwave would keep Starscream's own thrusters out of the smelter. Soundwave would not enjoy that very much. 

Soundwave may have been Megatron's – aft-licking, undeserved, _inexplicable_ – favourite, but he was responsible for his own job. There was no way he'd escape unscathed if a raid went to pieces due to a genuine frag-up on his behalf.

And Soundwave was every bit as much a Decepticon as the rest of the army. So if it _was_ bad intel... then Soundwave would do what anybody else would do. He would patch the problem, sure. But he would also find some other Decepticon to take the fall for it.

It was not likely to be one of his own precious subordinates.

Starscream was well aware that he was, for some mysterious reason, a _soft_ target at whom to fling accusations of treason – Megatron being notoriously unreasonable about these things at the best of times, of course – and he had the sinking, uncomfortable sensation deep in his fuel tanks that Soundwave was much more likely to pull out some circumstantial evidence against him than to quietly accept any degree of chastisement.

Starscream tried to think of any recent contact he might have had with an Autobot that could look, however wrongly, suspiciously like treason if viewed from an unkind angle, but... 

Actually, all of his recent treasonous doings were essentially Decepticon-only, no Autobots involved. In fact, nearly all of Starscream's interactions with the Autobots in general had been entirely above-board (by which he meant: violent) since his arrival on Earth, at the very least. That was a mildly surprising revelation. He kept hunting through his own memory files to find an exception -- there had to have been one, surely? -- but he found none.

It did stand to reason, in a way: Starscream had not joined the Decepticon war effort because he secretly wanted to get cozier with Autobots. He usually wanted to shoot the Autobots roughly as much as he wanted to shoot his own leader, and with _much_ less complex feelings about the matter.

So... Soundwave would have his work cut out for him if he wanted to point the finger at Starscream. It would be difficult to come up with anything so damning as, say, encrypted cross-faction communication logs. That was a good thing, but it didn't lessen the prickling, upset queasiness of Starscream's fuel tanks.

...Although that might also have been because, instead of focusing on the datapad idling in his hand, Starscream was passively receiving the visual of Scrapper carefully drawing another piece of ruptured fuel tank out of Astrotrain's _wide open guts_. It gleamed wetly with a dirty pink sheen in the light of the repair bay. Tiny wire threads of sensory circuitry stuck out in thin coppery filaments, burnt at the edge where they had been snapped by the sonic blast.

Scrapper laid it out on a pink-stained rag without looking away from the ugly hole. Astrotrain's vents hitched in a sob. Starscream didn't even bother recording the visual of him leaking coolant all over his face, either for entertainment or blackmail. Everyone cried during the kind of surgery that needed patient feedback. Pain heated up the internals until a mech either flooded with coolant, which leaked, or fried his processor trying to look tough, and that was just how it was. 

Starscream did watch, though, unable to look away from the gleam of those wet, pink-edged parts in the light.

"Your repairs are integrating," said Hook. 

Starscream had noticed his approach, but he'd been classed as relatively low threat. He turned his helm toward him now.

"Nothing's been rejected – well, of course not," he interjected, waving one hand as though rejection of one of _his_ repairs was utterly unthinkable, "– and your systems will recover their efficiency in a groon or two when your automatic repair slows down. You can go."

Starscream bristled at his tone. There was _one_ mech on this ship who got to order Starscream around – and that was a temporary state of affairs, which would no longer apply once Megatron had finally met his fate. He felt one of his wings twitch angrily, but he couldn't snap at Hook – not if he wanted to be understood, anyway – and his other options were painstakingly writing out his admonishment... or just shooting the smug overreaching scraphead. 

He sniffed, and then declined to acknowledge Hook's intolerable rudeness even as he flagged it and filed it away for later retrieval.

Starscream slithered off the repair berth and avoided looking back at Astrotrain or Scrapper, even though he could definitely hear the triple changer's voice beginning to hitch into gross ugly sobs while he reported his current sensory errors.

"We'll comm you when your parts are done," Hook said, already having returned his attention to his instruments and away from Starscream. 

No longer a project, no longer an interest; that was how the Constructicons operated. Starscream was torn between feeling grateful to no longer be an object of any interest and feeling slighted that anybody under his command might not recognise that he, Starscream, was _always_ the most important thing in the room. But he couldn't respond to the insult anyway. 

Restless, bitter and unsettled, he left the energon-scented repair bay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It might not seem like two weeks is a super long time to update a fic but actually this fic is _written_ and I'm just _this bad_ at editing. *covers my face*


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Starscream tries out personnel management, Soundwave calls a staff meeting, and someone hasn't been paying their taxes. That's it. That's what happens this chapter.

Starscream had an office. Technically. He didn’t use it often.

For one, it was near the bridge, where Soundwave was virtually guaranteed to overhear any stray thought that dropped out of background processing and accidentally hit the communications subsystem. And secondly… Starscream had seen what cycles of sitting hunched fiddling with data pads had done to Megatron’s joints. His heavily reinforced joints _creaked_ under the strain of moving his gargantuan aft around when he’d been sitting too long in one attitude. It was shameful.

And a little scary. Starscream never, ever wanted _his_ frame to sound like that.

So Starscream did his own data work from on his feet, or in the sky, which was where a Decepticon warrior belonged anyway. 

But now he was using the office. He had to, because he’d been cruelly grounded by the gross medical mismanagement of Hook and the Constructicons, and he needed somewhere where he could, _ugh_, sit down and do his data work on actual data pads.

Writing up his raid report by hand – by _hand_, like some kind of, of savage, or like a _human_, it was disgusting – took a long time. However, without getting his processor repaired he was cut off from data transfer and relegated to the stylus and data pad. 

Usually it would have merely been a process of linking up, remotely or by cable, to a document and arranging his report into neat packages of data that would unfold, rapidly and easily into readable content for any mech who accessed them. They would be updated on the comms systems first, and then loaded in a batch to the Victory when imports were processed. Writing reports was a process he had refined at the science academy, and up until right now, he’d felt as though it was more or less effortless.

Slowly tapping each character out on his data pad forced him to keep going back and checking that each one made sense and got across exactly what he wanted – there was no additional data to provide context or connotation, so the actual content of his writing had to be clear in the characters themselves. It was a long process.

It was a task that had to be done, so he took the opportunity to ensure that all his feelings about the catastrophically botched raid came across _loud and clear_. 

He felt his three-page critique of Megatron's 'rescue' was particularly inspired. There had been _no call_ for any of that petrorabbit-brained nonsense. Starscream had had it _under control_. He was keen to make it painfully clear to Megatron that it had been his interference, and not Starscream's raid plan, that had made them come out down on energon despite the – admittedly minor – acquisitions they'd made during the raid.

There were no raids to lead, no drills to run, no inspections to complete, not even any _useful conversations_ to be had, really, while his language centres were offline. But that did not mean Starscream had no work: reviewing the plans for raiding that Skywarp was making – by which Starscream meant rewriting them entirely with added _constructive and educational commentary_ – took up a long time when it was done by hand. 

Since he was stuck like this anyway, he had also taken the time to personally review the filing of every report submitted by air corps personnel since they’d crashed on Sol-3. Then, there was generating the duty roster, a task he despised and usually left to the last breem… but which gained appeal when he had few other avenues for reminding his subordinates of his power and control. 

In that vein, there were performance reviews to be painstakingly written out, too. In some cases, he saw fit to give them in person.

“You are a disgrace,” Starscream said flatly, arms crossed and wings flared intimidatingly high and wide. 

His voice came out entirely as static, but Acid Storm seemed to know instinctively that he was being reprimanded, because he froze at the tone. His vibrant green wings twitched under Starscream’s scrutiny.

Acid Storm, with Nova Storm and Ion Storm, had been involved in _one_ major mission, scouting and perimeter runs for Shockwave aside, in the past four million years – and he’d fragged it up royally. No reprimand had ever been given, so Starscream was rectifying that. Acid Storm was the only one of the team currently stationed on this slimy damp little mudball, having been required for one of Skywarp’s more promising raid plans, but all three of them would be able to see the stark revisions to their personnel files. 

“Your military performance has been only slightly less embarrassing than your paint job,” Starscream informed him loftily. He had made sure that his comments were painstakingly written out in a memo, too, so Acid Storm could really appreciate them. 

“You were sent to stop the Autobots from gaining valuable mechanical components, and your execution was roughly as effective as the average _solvent shower_!" The threat of acid rain had seemed a lot more severe once, when they’d not been stationed on a planet where it occurred naturally. Unsurprisingly, the Autobots had rallied beyond it. “A _cleaning drone_ could match your performance by accident!"

Starscream sneered at him -- but only side-on. Lime green all over with red stripes on his wings? That paint job was an affront to the entire Decepticon Empire. Starscream didn’t usually make a habit of _too_ strictly enforcing matters of taste among his forces, but there was such a thing as crossing a line… 

Acid Storm didn’t look away while Starscream was speaking -- it was more than his wings were worth to act like he wasn't paying attention -- but it was clear that he was accessing his memo, because his twitching wings stiffened. 

“Starscream, nobody gets reprimanded for his paint job,” he protested.

“I am providing constructive feedback,” Starscream warned him in a short blat of static, and since that just prompted a perplexed frown, the air between them filled with the distinctive whine of a null ray. It was helpful in that it did not require translation. “Fix it, or I will show you that I can be _deconstructive_, too.”

“Alright, alright!” Acid Storm held up his hands, cringing away. “I’ll paint over them.”

“Good. Get out.” Starscream put up his gun, and, since he was incomprehensible, pointed toward the door. He watched the hideous red marks weave in the air as Acid Storm retreated. 

He rolled his eyes. Personnel management was _so_ tedious – and _thankless_, too. Probably why he let so much slide, so regularly. Still, it would be nice to see a bit of _discipline_ around here...

Because the work _was_ tedious and boring, he made sure to root out any hint of dissatisfaction his air corps expressed in response. He found that, like with Acid Storm, the sound of a null ray powering up silenced most of the opposition to his helpful and constructive overhaul. Starscream's language centres were damaged; his aim was not.

Amid this storm of administrative zeal (which was certainly not, as Thundercracker had gently suggested, just Starscream taking his temper out on his subordinates – in reality, it had the secondary function of making sure every single mech on the ship knew he was still in charge), he took the scant personal time he actually had in the laboratory.

Starscream's ability to work on the voice commands for his drone was obviously compromised, so instead he focused on the weapons systems and armour. A drone's limitations were quite different to a mech's: unlike a real, conscious Cybertronian, the drone's frame and systems were not limited to what could be supported by its laser core. Ripping a drone's power source out, tinkering with it and reinserting it with supplementary power was not a risky operation – and Starscream had to do it several times, burying his arms and head in the deep chassis of the monstrous drone, surrounded by singe marks and acrid smells and old circuitry. 

The mounted laser cannons were unwieldy but there was no way a regular blaster would make it through Megatron's _ridiculous_ armour.

And it _was_ ridiculous.

In fact, Starscream had written the equations several times. The amount of pure power necessary to compromise Megatron's armour was sufficiently great that he had checked, over and over, frowning fiercely in disbelief, just to make sure the numbers he was getting were even _possible_.

Then he had scooped up his data pad and hurled it across the room, seething. 

The numbers were possible, and they sent him into a tailspin of inexpressible, impotent rage. The integrity of Megatron's outer armour was enough to thwart any onboard weaponry Starscream could install in himself. Unlike a drone, _his_ laser core could not be augmented without major surgery at least.

This time, when he kicked the table, he wasn’t injured. It flipped and crashed into the far wall, taking several pieces of equipment with it. This did not in any way lessen the wild fury that gripped him. 

The laboratory was made much the worse for wear during Starscream's ensuing temper tantrum. Then, when the red haze had cleared from his vision, the error messages had slowed and the coolant spewing into the casing of his processor had cooled his circuits from a sizzle to a hum, he stood venting hard in the mess. 

His fans hissed angrily in the sudden echoing silence. When his emotional subprocessor stopped trying to hijack all the power from his logic circuits – although he couldn't seem to get its stray processes to stop spilling into frontal processing entirely – he went back to the personnel records and wrote three people up for sloppy presentation. Dirge's thrusters were a crime against good taste anyway, even if they weren't strictly a threat to the operation of the Decepticon army.

How could Megatron possibly be generating enough power to even _carry_ such armour? He was big, yes, but Motormaster was just as big, and Starscream was sure _he_ didn’t generate half so much raw power. The thought of that much power at anybody's fingertips – other than his own – drove Starscream absolutely wild.

This, at least, explained how his power output overwhelmed Starscream’s systems so easily whenever he plugged in. 

His circuitry gave a hopeful sort of throb in response to the thought, which Starscream ignored. He was avoiding Megatron right now. 

Megatron was suspicious of Starscream right now (for no good reason, since he had not even discovered Starscream’s latest plot), and in a foul mood to boot. 

Megatron hadn’t liked Starscream’s mission report. 

Seething, and steaming now with the confused, conflicting impulses of his frame – toward further pointless destruction and interface simultaneously – Starscream was tempted to subject Thundercracker, too, to the excesses of his temper. But he would have to content himself with ignoring his trine mate's comms and complaining about his character aloud – if he actually reprimanded him on his permanent record, there was a chance he'd stop running interference with Skywarp. And Skywarp could by no means be trusted as the ranking air officer on duty without Thundercracker's assumed but largely unofficial supervision.

This productive business of aggressive sulking, wrecking stuff, and terrorising his subordinates was interrupted after a few short planetary rotations by an insistent ping from Megatron himself.

Starscream could passively avoid Megatron from now until the heat death of the universe, but a direct order for his presence was... well, Starscream had gotten this far by knowing when to push his luck and when to cower and beg. He knew he ignored an order like this at his own peril. 

If Megatron wanted to see him, he would see him, and Starscream would not benefit from forcing him to seek him out. It was, arguably, also the case that since Megatron was his direct superior Starscream was sort of _obligated_ to follow his orders anyway – but Starscream considered this state of affairs temporary, and most of Megatron's orders to be more like optional suggestions, anyway, the urgency of which largely depended on how fast Megatron would find out about any... little deviations.

A second in command was expected to be independent, anyway.

But attending his _glorious leader_ on demand was less of an adherence to the chain of command and more like a personal safety concern.

It turned out that Megatron's information-devoid and peremptory 'urgent' command to attend him in meeting room DSV-21 was actually an order to yet another meeting. Soundwave's investigation was over, and the results were to be presented.

If Starscream had been Skywarp (a deeply upsetting thought), he would have felt very concerned by the possibilities in this meeting. Since he was not Skywarp, he took his stylus, his data pad and his disdainfully bored expression and slung himself into Megatron's usual seat at the head of the table.

He did not bother to rise when Megatron entered. Their leader's footsteps echoed heavily, and his frame, always big, loomed intimidatingly huge from where Starscream lounged in his seat. His shadow fell over him, and for an astrosecond all Starscream's sensory suite provided was information about Megatron: his size, the streaming menace of his huge dark shadow, the hum and clunk of his ancient and aged internals, the heat of his overclocked mechanisms.

"Still not talking?" Megatron said, insincerely conciliatory. "What a pity. It would be a great shame if Soundwave's investigation turned up any wrongdoing on your behalf when you can't _talk yourself out of it_."

This may have been Megatron's irritation at finding his seat occupied talking, but it also might have been something Soundwave had turned up, fabricated or... er, otherwise.

Starscream eyed Megatron. He was big. He was gleaming dully in the lights, silvery and heavily armoured. And he was intimidating. Only an idiot would pretend otherwise. It wasn't impossible that Megatron would know something about Soundwave's report before he presented it to the rest of command – quite the opposite. He could be anticipating that something damning would come up about Starscream's conduct, and preparing to beat the plating off him right in front of all these mechs Starscream would still have to work with going forward.

Starscream's engine wanted to turn over in preparation for flight. He held onto his nerve with determination and gave Megatron a sharp, contrary smile.

It must have nevertheless communicated a little of the nervousness he felt, because Megatron smiled right back.

"Don't worry, Starscream," he purred, "I'll be sure to _represent your interests_ just as well as you deserve." He did not throw Starscream out of his seat, and instead sat in the next one over with all the quiet grace of an entire iron works falling over.

This threat was about as subtle as Megatron ever got, so Starscream decided, on the balance, that he was probably in a better mood than he had been the last time they had had a meeting. Hard for it to be a worse mood, really.

Skywarp took the seat a little to Starscream's right, arguably close enough to catch Starscream in the blast if anyone shot at him. Starscream scowled at him. 

Laserbeak would inevitably end up attached to the ceiling somewhere, and was probably already in some dark corer. He'd take comments about Soundwave's information gathering work very, very personally.

"Ramjet says you wrote him up for having paint transfers on his wings," Skywarp said blithely.

Starscream sniffed. Going about with Thrust's colours on his wings was tacky. Just because Starscream, always a magnanimous commander, usually let such vile little indiscretions slide was no reason –

"Is it because nobody's clanged your bolts off recently and you’re jealous?" Skywarp wondered. “Because, you know, Screamer –”

Starscream turned his helm slowly and fixed him with a baleful stare, ignoring the pointed cough from his other side, where Megatron was clearing his vents like that might hide his undignified laughter.

Skywarp stopped talking but he met Starscream's gaze with a completely oblivious off-on flicker of his optics. "What?" he said finally. Then, "Well. Is it?"

Instead of trying to explain via a data pad, which Skywarp would certainly not read, Starscream pulled up the datawork he would need to write Skywarp up, just as surely as he had Thrust and Ramjet.

Megatron, eager as ever to undermine his second in command, leaned over and took it off him. "You're not going to write a reprimand for _speaking inappropriately to a superior officer_," he said with heavy and pointed irony. “If he goes down for that, Starscream, _you_ are going with him.”

Starscream hissed and lunged for the data pad, claws-first, drowning out Skywarp’s indignant yelp with his own snarling static.

Megatron calmly subspaced the data pad and caught Starscream's wrist in a huge, firm grip – on board weaponry pointed _away_ from his face, of course – and then turned toward the entry. "Soundwave," he said, squeezing tighter when Starscream tried to pull away. His plating creaked ominously in Megatron's iron grip.

In the doorway, Soundwave inclined his head and came into the room, and the light threw his shadow across the table. They were all there, then – with Soundwave, and Motormaster, and Onslaught, Thundercracker and Skywarp, all uneasily seated in the same room together.

"Let's have it," said Megatron expectantly. He did not release Starscream, and Starscream snarled all the louder when he realised that Megatron was holding him in anticipation of Soundwave's presentation.

"I have done nothing!" he hissed in a meaningless blat of static. "I am loyal to the cause–!" he yanked harder on his arm, but Megatron's grip was unshakeable.

"Oh, no, Starscream," he said in his deep, hollow voice, unbearably smug, "you're not going anywhere until Soundwave has finished."

Starscream yowled with offence and fury, and that came across loud – very loud – and clear where proper words still refused to. 

Did his giant, clumsy, stupid _oaf_ of a leader truly believe that Starscream had sabotaged his own raid? Certainly, such a tactic wasn't beyond him if he thought it would deflect attention from something else – but he'd sent Skywarp to safety when he ordered him to return with the energon, a thing he'd never have done if he'd thought that whoever remained was going to get _slammed into a mountainside._

He shrieked, hitting such a pitch that even Megatron's face screwed up to hear it. On his other side, Skywarp leaned away.

Soundwave interrupted, blank-faced and with blank optics, still standing at the far end of the table. His voice was devoid of tone: "Starscream: innocent."

There was a pause.

“...I am?” Starscream crackled, suspiciously.

His voice was almost drowned out by Megatron barking, “_What?_”

The silence was deafening, and it went on for nine full astroseconds.

Nobody moved. Even Skywarp, who had so stupidly brought about this mess by questioning Soundwave's information in the first place, seemed absolutely baffled into stillness.

"Um. He is?" Skywarp wondered, finally. “Really?”

Megatron’s grip had gone lax at Soundwave’s announcement. Starscream finally wrenched his wrist out of its hold with an ugly _scree_ of metal. He immediately used his newly freed hand to smack Skywarp.

Clank! "Ow!"

"Uh," said Motormaster, eloquently.

“Hmm,” said Onslaught, calculating and dubious.

Soundwave seemed to understand the effect of his statement at last. "Mission failure: not Starscream's fault," he clarified in the increasingly tense silence.

"Ohh," said someone. It might have been Thundercracker. He was sitting too far away to smack. Shame.

Starscream heard the little huff Megatron made with his vents. He turned his fierce scowl on him instead and, in the absence of any ability to actually communicate – Megatron still had his datapad, after all – he hissed.

"Shh," said Megatron, without looking.

The stillness around the table was no longer incredulous, but it seemed somehow more tense. If there was someone betraying them all to the Autobots, and it _wasn't_ some elaborate plot of Starscream’s to overthrow Megatron, well, then... who was it? 

Trying to murder your superior officer was one thing – showed initiative, really – but sabotaging the cause was quite another.

It all suddenly sounded much more serious.

Soundwave projected a feed from his chestplates then, over the table so they could all see it. It was an aerial view of a nondescript part of the Autobots' Ark. What they could see was just a corridor, with weathered and cracked plates on the walls.

Everything was an _exceptionally ugly_ orange. 

...That deserved a write up for being a _crime against his optics_. If Starscream's current campaign of aggressively policing the state of his air corps' paint prevented his ever having to see anything in that particular shade again, he'd consider it time well spent.

Nevertheless he leaned forward, paying closer attention – this looked like a feed from Laserbeak's records. From the recording, he could hear the approaching clank of somebody's feet – more than one person, and one of them was a heavy frame.

Starscream sneered as the heavy steps came closer to Laserbeak's vantage and that _rolling disaster_ that headed the Autobots' research division, Wheeljack, was revealed.

"I sure hope Chip's new work at that power plant goes okay," he was saying, fretting just like someone put in charge of a campaign for which he was not entirely certain of his aptitude.

A second later, Optimus Prime stepped into view. That must have been the heaviest set of steps they could hear from Laserbeak’s audio pickup. The top of his helm was noticeably closer to the camera. Laserbeak was lucky, Starscream thought critically, that his internal mechanisms were so quiet. All it would take was one one soft noise, one reason to look up. 

Optimus Prime was naive and ridiculous, but he packed more than enough of a punch to take out little Laserbeak.

Soundwave seemed fine, though, relaxed as he ever was and utterly impassive, so he must have returned in good form.

"I'm sure it will be fine, Wheeljack," Optimus Prime said soothingly, "Our human friend Chip is clever and resourceful. And the plant is too small to be an attractive target for the Decepticons."

Starscream, perhaps perversely, liked the way Prime said 'the Decepticons', like their army was some terrible thing from a scary story, or perhaps an ion storm or a quake; something unknowable and not entirely predictable and very, very dangerous.

"Aw, Optimus, I know that," Wheeljack agreed, a little sheepishly, optics downcast, "just..."

As befit a leader when confronted with a subordinate who was whimpering, awkwardly, like a frightened retrorat in a trap, Optimus Prime smacked him on the shoulder with a clank. He couldn’t have hit him very hard, though, because Wheeljack didn't stumble or slam into the wall. Starscream sneered quietly.

"I understand, my friend. Rest assured, we'll be on standby should he call us." This statement seemed to assuage some of Wheeljack's discomfort. Starscream realised then that whole business with the shoulder-smacking was intended to be an affectionate act of reassurance, and not a particularly ineffective blow. Ugh. _Autobots._ Baffling.

Soundwave cut the display.

The next clip was from what must have been the internal security cameras of the plant itself, showing a young man in a wheelchair being led to an enormous bank of boxy Earthling computer systems.

Just a few jerky, grainy moments after he'd settled in to work at one of the consoles, Skywarp, Thundercracker and Starscream were seen to burst in through the far wall in a rain of stone and dust. Their landing shook the camera in its mounting.

"This footage: not available on network," Soundwave said. 

Starscream squinted, having to work hard to hear the hint of disapproval in his voice. He was pretty sure that was what it was, though.

That, Starscream assumed, was meant to account for the appalling quality of the display – it always lost something when one had to turn the humans' vile slippery tape into a proper series of data packages that worked with a Cybertronian's specs. His lip curled into an expression of utmost distaste.

"So you sent Ravage to collect it afterwards," Megatron said, and Soundwave nodded silently.

The next piece of information contained no visuals, just audio: a panicked, undeniably human voice – it was always obvious, since they were so close to Cybertronian voices, but with a horrible added wetness that could not be hidden, because the components the humans used to create sound were all soft, and wet, and _made of meat_. This voice was saying, low but frantic, over a poor line: "Optimus! Come in, Optimus Prime! It's the Decepticons!"

He liked how the human said 'the Decepticons' even better: with helpless, shaking terror. Even that didn't make Starscream smile now, though. Not with this new, ridiculous information.

In the silence that followed, after the end of the recording, Skywarp said what they were all thinking: "Are we supposed to be able to recognise the different meat sacks now?"

It wasn't how Starscream might have phrased it, but it was a question to which he too wanted an answer. _Any_ human seemed as though it could be an Autobot's particular friend at any given moment – they had no use, were mostly interchangeable, and they all looked virtually identical to most scans. Meat, meat, more meat.

Megatron was frowning. "Why did we not follow up on Laserbeak's initial observation?" he wondered.

Soundwave, impassive, said, "Unable to determine new employment location. Humans: lowest priority."

"Well, of course they are," Starscream couldn't help but say, which – more static. Of course. Megatron looked at him sideways, and Starscream had the most peculiar sensation of having said nothing intelligible but being explicitly understood. His wings twitched.

"Pure coincidence, then," mused Megatron. He seemed almost relaxed about it, leaning back in his seat, slouching disrespectfully with the huge expanse of his chest plating gleaming dully under the lights, an oversized predator at rest.

"On _this_ occasion," he amended pointedly, still looking right at Starscream.

Starscream bared his teeth. 

"You need to review how the Autobots' human... pets... are prioritised for intelligence analysis, Soundwave," Megatron said, although his optics, glowing like hot coals beneath the edge of his helm, remained fixed on Starscream.

"Affirmative," Soundwave acknowledged immediately, inevitably, like the wheel-licking, rust-guzzling aft-kisser he was.

Starscream met Megatron's burning optics and lifted his chin.

Megatron snorted softly and returned his attention to Soundwave at last. "Anything further to report?"

Soundwave didn't hesitate. "Evidence of Decepticon warriors colluding with Autobots: found."

Megatron's relaxed posture changed in an instant: he sat forward in his seat, suddenly terribly attentive. Everybody around the table went tense. Even Starscream, whose face scrunched up into a tremendous scowl. 

There was somebody _else_ plotting to undermine Megatron? Unacceptable.

"Swindle: selling goods to Autobots."

Oh.

Starscream had never heard Onslaught make such an incredibly weary noise as the sound that escaped him then, when the whole table turned to look his way. The message was clear: _Isn't Swindle your problem?_

Apparently not satisfied with merely tossing Swindle under the bus, Soundwave then chose to reverse over him as well: he generated a holographic list of times, dates, products, transactions and contacts. There were unknowns here and there, especially in places where it seemed that even Swindle had not been entirely certain who he had sold to – only that the data had come from Teletraan. But the list was otherwise comprehensive – and very, very long.

This was not, Starscream decided, plotting to meaningfully undermine Megatron's control of the Decepticon army. This was just... plotting to get paid. Paid rather a lot, mind you. But it was just money.

Starscream propped his chin on one fist, immediately bored, and rapidly skimmed the list that Soundwave was projecting. Almost none of the products actually seemed that dangerous – they were silly things, old music, rust sticks, little comforts and baubles. He could be accused of boosting Autobot morale at best. And Megatron did _that_ every time he booted his stupid vocaliser in public.

But the real problem wasn't what he was giving the Autobots, of course. The real problem was that transactions conducted in secret did not get declared, and therefore could not contribute to tithed extra-military income. Evading one's taxes to the Decepticon cause was not a thing _anyone_ wanted to be charged with. 

It wasn't like busting a few heads that you weren't meant to bust and spending a few joors scrubbing barnacles off the outside of the hull. Every Decepticon was brought online for war, and that meant that occasionally… combat was needed. If it wasn’t provided, the warriors would find it on their own. That, at least, was perfectly understandable. 

But extra-military income was meant to be declared and the tithe paid to contribute toward the central funds that kept Decepticons repaired and in the field.

So, yes, Swindle was definitely in the slag and they all knew it – and he hadn't even had the grace to make it an interesting crime. From the perspective of command, he'd sold them all out for a few extra galactic credits.

Interesting, though, to note that Swindle would have had to have twisted his wormy way around all his extra programming to do it. That was a more interesting conundrum than the one currently being presented to them in the form of this long list of transactions…

Mercy, but the list of transactions was still scrolling, on and on and on. The expression on Onslaught's face had closed off when Starscream looked back at him, but it didn't look good that Swindle's own team commander either hadn't known about _this many_ indiscretions, or, perhaps worse, had known but done nothing.

Everyone around the table was watching him, now, optics flicking from the list projected by impassive Soundwave to Onslaught's blank face and back. Idly, Starscream recalled an article he'd read once that had clained natural, unenhanced Cybertronian senses could find energon from up to seventy megamiles away.

The list was _still_ scrolling. Megatron's internals were starting to change frequency, humming ominously with a fresh flush of power.

“Enough," he snarled at last, surging from his seat next to Starscream. Onslaught flinched. Starscream, having expected it, did not. Megatron batted at the display as though that would actually make it go away. 

Soundwave obligingly cut the feed. A moment later, the entire lengthy file hit the general comms system at an officer level. 

Megatron’s cannon growled as it heated up. He aimed and fired in one smooth motion. There was a roar and an eruption of streaming light.

Onslaught cried out and flailed sideways, dodging instinctively as the blast went right past his helm. It had probably hurt his audio system fiercely, even if it hadn’t hit him. His wild dive shoved his shoulder into Motormaster, who shoved him forcefully right back with a huge snarl of his own powerful engine. 

Right next to Starscream, Skywarp went fuzzy around the edges for a moment, as though he’d engaged his warp drive before he realised it wasn’t _him_ being shot at.

The wall behind Onslaught melted to slag in the spot where the blast struck it. 

There was a moment of silence.

“What the hell?” On the other side of the wall, Rumble’s small face leaned up and he peered in. “Uh,” he said. “Guys?”

Nobody responded, not even Soundwave, and after he took a moment to read the mood of the room, Rumble’s face sunk quietly out of view again. He disappeared and did not come back.

Inside the meeting room, the air was very still – there was just the rush of Onslaught’s cooling fans, kicking up under the stress, and the quiet, spiteful buzz of Megatron’s cannon.

Starscream leaned back in his chair.

Megatron was reacting as he usually did: loudly, and with maximum effort to intimidate. It was working, too. 

Even Soundwave, who was almost never an actual target of Megatron's ire, seemed warier for having been the one to report this bad – if incredibly predictable – news. It was not obvious, but Starscream was paying attention. There was a tautness in his cables, a readiness in his limbs. Nothing so gauche as hissing vents or a processor beginning to hum, of course, but the signs of subtle discomfort were there if you were looking for them.

But Megatron's rage, Starscream thought, was largely for show in this case. Onslaught needed to _believe_ someone was three astroseconds from getting slagged, but there was no way Megatron was really going to put a whole combiner team out of commission just for _tax evasion_. 

But Onslaught needed to believe he would, or else he might become... tricky. Onslaught liked his convoluted little plans just as much as the rest of them, and he wasn’t as dumb as he looked.

So Starscream leaned back and watched him with a narrow, calculating gaze.

When Megatron cooled off a little -- or at least allowed himself to appear to have cooled off a little -- he put down the cannon and everybody relaxed marginally. Then they got down to specifics and he made exactly the call Starscream had expected.

"Swindle will report – promptly – for discipline," not exactly a command any Decepticon liked to hear aimed at himself, but it sounded even more ominous in Megatron's deep and rumbling voice with all the buzzing hollowness of his ancient vocaliser pronouncing it. "He will pay his tithe – and the interest on this loan the Decepticon cause has _so generously_ given him – and then he will continue his little business on the side under Soundwave's direct supervision."

A cable in Onslaught's neck twitched. Megatron didn't usually interfere with the control that a combiner team's leader enjoyed over the members of that team.

He didn't protest, though.

Soundwave nodded immediately.

"Wh... you're just gonna let him _keep doing it_?" Skywarp wondered.

Starscream could have kicked the idiot. Actually – actually, he realised, there was absolutely nothing stopping him from kicking the idiot. He didn’t need language processing to kick. So he did. _Clank._

"Ouch! What the hell, Screamer!"

He kicked him again, harder. The present irony of that name, and the way it made Onslaught's optics gleam and Motormaster's engine idle a little higher, was _not_ lost on him the way it was on Skywarp.

Megatron regarded them all in cynical silence for a moment. He should have been happy, Starscream thought, to learn that none of this scheming against him had been Starscream's today. But he clearly wasn't, from that speculative scowl. It seemed, on the contrary, as his optics shifted to him, that he was even more annoyed with Starscream than usual. That was unfair, any way you looked at it.

What, did he get _sad and lonely_ if Starscream wasn't actively plotting against him? Did he _miss_ it? 

Not that Starscream _wasn't_ plotting against him, even – of course he was. Just not in this specific way. He liked to think he had a little more class than _colluding with Autobots_ and _tax evasion_. Please. That was just embarrassing.

"It's a valuable avenue of information gathering, especially if the Autobots think it's a secret Swindle's keeping," Megatron said, as though explaining to an especially stupid drone.

Skywarp, naturally, missed this subtext entirely and said, "Ohhh," like this was a new and brilliant idea on Megatron's behalf, while that oversized, overclocked, overrated _idiot_ stared at him. 

It wasn't, by the way. Megatron had not had a new idea in millions of orns, and precious few brilliant ones. Trust Skywarp to be this easily impressed. Starscream scowled fiercely and, unable to actually drawl the deeply sarcastic, _'Yes, once again **mighty** Megatron has astounded us all with his **razor intellect**,'_ that was waiting in frontal processing, settled for kicking Skywarp yet again.

"Ow! Seriously, Screamer, _what_?" he squawked.

Starscream sniffed.

Megatron, annoyingly, only seemed to blend more of that dull, cynical amusement into his impatience and bad temper. It would figure that he would be the only person who knew exactly how much he annoyed Starscream. This, perversely... annoyed him more.

"Anything else?" Megatron said then, eyeing the table. It sounded innocuous enough, but everyone knew you needed a really good reason to keep Megatron at a meeting table for more than about a breem. If it wasn't on the agenda, it needed to be the kind of issue that really couldn't wait.

Wisely, nobody said anything. Not even Skywarp, for once.

"Dismissed," said Megatron. He heaved his enormous frame out of its seat. "I trust there will be no repetitions of this idiocy," he added, waving one hand to encompass the entire meeting. He towered over them all.

Even the clank and screech of a group of mechs rising to flee his presence did not quite drown out the chorus of 'Yes, sirs,' that came in response.

Starscream lifted his wings, lifted his chin, and stalked out ahead of Skywarp, who was still whingeing about his thruster. "I think you cracked my plating," he complained bitterly, leaning forward to examine one long and shapely leg.

As though a few love taps with the sharp edge of Starscream's foot were going to put a crack in a real seeker? If that was actually the case, he should have been thanking Starscream for sending him to the repair bay before he went into the field and discovered his glass plating the hard way. Starscream ignored him utterly.

Megatron had stolen his data pad anyway, he remembered, so it wasn't as though he could respond to Skywarp except with more physical violence. Which... Hmm. Actually.

He paused and turned slightly, giving Skywarp a chance to catch up despite his moronic, exaggerated limping. Then he shoved him into the wall. Skywarp yelped. 

Hmm. Yes. Satisfying.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm 100% sure I had notes for this but I'm just... this chapter is done. finally. goodbye, chapter.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fluffy sex, Megatron makes a mildly disconcerting discovery, and Starscream is once again deeply offended that anyone should find him suspect.

Starscream chose to fetch his ration before going back to his work. He was on an off cycle, technically, since the damage to his language centres rendered him incapable of taking on leadership of any mission requiring more personnel than just himself. Not even Megatron was daft enough to try to put him under Skywarp's command, however temporarily.

The dispensary was full and loud – even the officers' mess was noisy and packed with rowdy mechs on the Decepticon ship. They were a people built for war, after all, and bored Decepticons were aggressive Decepticons. Unfortunately, most of the damage from their recent raid had been fixed, and so they were… restive.

Starscream ignored the call of his name from one corner of the room – there was no way anyone here could have failed to hear by now that he couldn't speak, and therefore their motive for wanting to talk to him could hardly be pure.

He did not spare anybody so much as a glance and he left with his cube in hand and wings held stiff and high. Idiots.

Starscream saw the edge of one bright green wing disappear through a doorway as he turned the corner that put him in the same corridor as his office. It would be a lot harder to recognise Acid Storm scrambling into a maintenance cupboard to avoid him if he wasn’t painted _lime green_. 

He ignored him. He was done wasting his time on Acid Storm, and when he resumed full duty he’d have him back on Cybertron so fast his navigational suite would glitch.

Starscream keyed the code to his office –  _manually_ , ugh – and let the door hiss softly closed behind him. The room was becoming more… lived in… the more time Starscream spent in it, a state which someone else might have classified as ‘catastrophically untidy’. There were empty cubes he’d been meaning to dispose of on one shelf, a mess of data work left in semi-organised chaos on his desk, and a data pad with a cracked screen that had fled captivity and escaped to the floor. (He might have thrown it at somebody.) 

The overhead lighting flickered annoyingly, too. (The data pad might have rebounded.)

No part of the Victory seemed designed with  _reasonable use_ in mind, really. He'd blame Soundwave for that. 

Starscream stopped in front of the desk, vented out, and drank his energon.

He wasn’t all that surprised when the door hissed open again behind him.

“Starscream. Is _this_ where you’ve been?” Megatron’s footsteps were heavy. “You’ve been avoiding me,” he added, as though it was some sort of secret.

_Figured that out all on your own, Megatron_? Starscream thought, but could not say. He lifted one wing in an elegant little shrug, and sipped from his cube. 

Megatron sighed through his vents, a deep, buzzing sound. Starscream felt the expelled heat wash over his back and wings like the rush of an unexpected thermal. Megatron came closer with a creak of old joints. He sounded like he needed an oil bath as much as Starscream wanted one.

Even as some of Starcream’s plating clamped down more securely at the threat of Megatron’s approach, sacrificing heat redistribution for armour, an idle process wondered what that might be like: curled against Megatron’s huge bulk and warm plates in a giant pool of hot oil, slick and slippery. He killed the process dismissively. Obviously his inability to express himself was making him delusional. And maudlin.

“You have to admit, Starscream, you were the obvious suspect,” Megatron said, now close enough that Starscream’s wings picked up the little vibrations in the air when he spoke.

Starscream admitted no such thing. Darkly he glowered over his wing at Megatron.

“Oh, don’t sulk,” Megatron chided, with a surprising lack of hostility. “It’s clear you’re up to _something_. But perhaps it was… uncharitable… to accuse even you of _colluding_ with _Autobots_.”

One of his big hands landed, predictably, upon the crimson plating of Starscream’s hips. A cable in his joint tensed until he could feel its trembling strain, while several protocols tried to assess whether or not that touch rated a true threat to his well-being. He considered shoving Megatron's hand off, which was no more than Megatron deserved – what was ‘even you’ supposed to mean? -- but it felt…

Not a threat, his code decided finally, and settled. The hand was warm and heavy, and Starscream’s plating took it upon itself to warm up and sensitise beneath the slow, circular rubbing of one of those blunt fingers.

It was as close to an apology as Megatron was likely to come, anyway.

Starscream let his plating relax, consciously, and tiny cracks re-opened over his tightly clamped joints and vulnerable seams. The air trapped inside seeped out again, warming the space between them. He heard Megatron’s vents cycle faster for a moment, drawing the gasses in for analysis. He didn’t know if that deep breath was pure sentiment or suspicion, but Megatron made no hostile move – he just kept rubbing soft maddening circles around Starscream’s hip plating. It was... coaxing.

After a moment, Starscream let his optics dim.

There was a gap there, beneath Megatron’s hand, where the red armour of Starscream’s hip met the white of his waist, clear only when he relaxed. Megatron’s thick fingers couldn’t fit through to touch the more sensitive wiring beneath, but they could skim over the tiny openings, disturb air currents. They could tease.

“Finish your cube,” he said.

His other hand was sliding pleasantly over the place where Starscream’s wing joined his thicker dorsal plating. The joint itself wasn’t unusually sensitive, but it did get stiff and sore when he held his wings too high and stiff for too long in root mode, which Starscream always did – wings up, back straight, chin up. Hmm. He shifted on his heels.

The pressure of Megatron’s hand felt astonishingly good, in a different way to the teasing circles on his hip: not teasing out soft little shivers of pleasure, but instead relieving discomfort so ingrained he'd practically forgotten it. Starscream's vocaliser gave a soft, relieved rumble without any input from his processor. Stupid, glitching little thing.

Hearing it, Megatron said, “Hmm,” and moved his other hand, bracing it against the lowest edge of Starscream’s canopy so he could put more pressure on the joint. He was strong enough that the plating compressed slightly around his fingers – Starscream was intimately familiar with how effortlessly Megatron could dent him. The pressure he applied there now transferred to the wires beneath without even the benefit of heat.

Starscream could feel the wing twitching wildly and he didn’t even care. He made a wordless, embarrassing noise, engines suddenly growling. And despite that sudden activity, he melted right into the touch.  He was more in danger of dropping the cube from his nerveless fingers than of finishing it. 

As that thought occurred to him, his fingers tightened on the energon cube. Everyone was hungry, there was never an excuse for wasting food-grade energon. He tossed it back mechanically, quickly, and barely tasted it.

Megatron rubbed over the sore spot again, harder, and this time he did let the empty container clatter back to the table.

He swore incoherently. 

“You like that,” Megatron said, again, as though he’d uncovered some sort of secret.

“Shut up and keep doing it,” said Starscream. Nothing but static emerged, but Megatron hummed and did it again anyway, and Starscream let himself relax his weight into the huge hand braced upon his front and purred.

He could have let him do that for about a vorn, but it was clear that Megatron’s objective in tracking Starscream back to his office was not really to rub the soreness out of his wings -- and he wasn’t coming across all nice and conciliatory because he just wanted to be _friendly_. Ha! He must have been eager, Starscream thought. He couldn’t possibly have finished beating Swindle into scrap metal – or even just assigning him punishment tasks for the next four million years, if he was truly serious about not putting Bruticus out of action.

Perhaps he was letting Onslaught handle that much, or, hm, he had mentioned Soundwave –

That complex thought got killed mid-process and Starscream groaned low in his throat when one of the kinks beneath the plating of his wing finally gave out. It resolved into a loose and tender little bundle of wires instead of a stiff knot. His wing twitched again, but Megatron was holding him too close for it to smack him. Starscream could feel his warm vents drifting over his throat, down beneath the relaxed gaps in his armour and over the vulnerable components below.

Pleasure and closeness and relaxation just made him that much more sensitive, and the slow rub of Megatron's fingers caused him to shudder. Intellectually he knew it was some mindless, atavistic encouragement to interface. It lingered in their code from the dimly remembered times before, when Cyertronians had not been allowed access to faster or more convenient methods of communication, when they had lived under the yoke of their near-mythical slaver-gods. Their coding remembered, even if they did not. And right now, Starscream's coding reminded him pointedly of the exquisite, satisfied throb Megatron could leave in his circuits. It was hard to remain adequately wary beneath all this weight of encouragement.

Starscream’s plates relaxed even further, seams wide open, and the room filled with the humming of his fans and engines, a low pleased purr. Megatron lifted him effortlessly and set him on the desk – not even roughly, really. He had better access this way, and Starscream could turn without clobbering him in the face with one wing.

Sitting on the edge of his own broad desk, he could enjoy the sheer size and enormous strength of Megatron’s hands shamelessly groping at every part of him, but he could also touch _him_. He hooked his long legs around the joints of Megatron’s hips and drew him in, closer, until he could press his own cockpit gently against the huge expanse of Megatron’s flat chestplates and feel the vibration of his heavier fans spinning hard, trying desperately to dump heat. Starscream's fingers, cleverer and quicker than Megatron’s, found tiny gaps and relaxed seams through which to barely skim little wires and components that rarely saw contact or pressure. 

Pressed up so close, he could feel every hitch or response across his own plating, and he enjoyed the sense of power they gave him. Megatron might allow him to do it, but there was still a part of Starscream, deep in his processes, a personality component so deeply coded that it would never be rooted out, which revelled in the control. When he skimmed his fingers over a port cover and Megatron’s big frame shuddered at his touch, he thought, unbidden:  _yes, yes, remember who does this to you. _ He smiled, a slash of metal teeth in his dark face.

“Yes,” he purred, a little buzz of useless static that required no translation. The port cover under his fingertips was warm with interest, and it popped eagerly open at his encouragement. 

Starscream dipped his fingers into the coiled cables, playing gently – one had to be gentle, with some kinds of hardware. Even Megatron knew it. The cabling was thick, and it  _looked_ as stupidly overpowered as it felt: insulated, thick, unwieldy, like it was made for enormous surges of power. Which it was. _Pit_ was it. Starscream licked his teeth.

“Open up,” Megatron said in a voice gone heavy and thick with the strain of speech. It happened when other systems demanded more power.

Starscream smiled but did not immediately comply. He leaned in harder to feel the heavy rumble of Megatron’s engine thrum right through his own cockpit.

These old ports were right at the back, shrouded in enticing, mysterious shadows. Megatron’s engine turned over when Starscream’s fingers pressed against the sensor-rich walls of the compartment, and he grunted, surprised, when Starscream rubbed their tips over the silvery gleam of the pins buried deep inside.

Coaxing now, Megatron’s fingers found the back edges of Starscream’s wings, playfully dragging sweet little tingles of power through the delicate sensory circuitry there. He drew him closer, held him just tight enough for Starscream to really feel the enormous strength of his limbs. Starscream grunted, short and involuntary. The pressure felt good.

He could already feel the heavy crackle of charge across Megatron's big frame. It was hot – _for _Starscream and _because of_ Starscream, both – and the power of it bled rapidly across to his own plating.  _You could have that_, his craving, throbbing circuitry reminded him. _It would feel so good_. 

Megatron said again, more firmly, “Open up, Starscream.”

Starscream opened up.

He wasn’t surprised when Megatron pressed the head of his cable right to the exposed port immediately. He twitched at the contact with such a sensitive area, but he also curled closer to it. The connector slid home, charge crackled, and Starscream made a soft, heady staticky noise as sudden forceful connection burst brightly over him.

That was nice. It always was, even when Megatron wasn't trying to crash him.

"Plug in,” said Megatron. It was only a growl in as much as everything sounded like a growl when his whole frame was rumbling with beautiful, uneven vibrations. "I want to feel you."

The demand came with a blistering pulse of charge from his half of the connection, and with nowhere to go the power just set Starscream’s circuits aflame and cycled and cycled. Thick, heady pleasure washed through him like a flood, hitting each system in its turn. It was enough to leave him dazed with it, shivering. His wires burned with it and his vents opened all the way to release more heat. He vented through his mouth, too. There was so much heat.

Megatron must have enjoyed the sight of him so messy, venting hard, with his plates wide open and dishevelled, because he groaned, “Look at you,” and dragged him yet closer, like he could combine them if he just got _close enough._

Starscream’s fingers shook now, when he drew out his own cable to plug into Megatron. The charge in him made his movements clumsy and jerky, and Megatron purred in possessive delight to see it. He helped him, thick fingers warm and heavy on Starscream’s paler plating. There was a moment of blind, overwhelming sensation when the tip slid home. Starscream could feel the tremor in Megatron’s frame then, too. Then the circuit closed and the connection opened between them, reciprocal.

Starscream’s vocaliser emitted only whines and buzzing while he panted, optics flicking off, frame throbbing with the full body pleasure of the charge pulsing between them. Megatron gripped ever harder – his plating would have dents, he was sure of it, and he didn’t even mind – leaned on him, on the desk between his thighs. Weak knee joints, Starscream thought hazily. He drew one hand over Megatron's helm, scraping his fingertips and making the big mech shudder. He’d bet he could make them _unhinge_.

Megatron vented hard into the side of his helm. He, too, was using his mouth as well as all his primary vents, fans hissing and internals thundering beneath his enormous chassis. Each hard vent buzzed over systems buried beneath his chest plates, the sound of a heavy frame working very hard indeed.

Starscream hooked his fingers into the seams where his plating had relaxed, and for once he was not thinking about how to damage the components underneath – just how to touch them just right with his fingertips to elicit the glorious heave and tremble of Megatron’s powerful frame beneath his hands. He passed his own charge through their connection, natural and reciprocal -- and because his much more efficient systems didn’t even know what to do with the massive surges of power Megatron generated anyway, aside from using them to drive Starscream crazy. He sought out the familiar, sensitive spots until the Megatron melted in against him, whining through his vents because his fans were running so hard.

Between them the power rose and rose with every surge. He could see, just for a second, when he slitted his optics back open, crackling sparks flaring and lighting the gaps between Megatron’s plates. Oh, he was close. He let his eyes fall offline again when Megatron’s arms contracted, crushing him still closer, scraping his canopy against his huge broad chest plates. It would have hurt if Starscream’s every system had not already been swamped with confused ecstasy, charge flooding him over capacity and making his limbs shake even as he gasped and clutched right back.

He knew it for a moment, when Megatron overloaded, just enough to think, _Megatron’s overloading_, at least, while that deep hollow voice made dumb, hard, satisfied noises that hit his audial pickup – he shuddered, like it was hot oil dripping down the support strut of his back – but then the massive surge of power that came with it hit him.

He wasn’t thinking then. Or seeing. Or even feeling really anything at all but the hot, blank, mindless rush of his own overload.

When he onlined his optics again, all he could see was the endless expanse of Megatron’s plating up close. He was still leaning much of his weight upon Starscream, and steaming softly.

Their plating ticked out of time as it cooled, metal contracting rapidly.

Starscream’s leg made an abortive twitch when he tried to move it, actuators fried – again. So he decided just to sit there for a few more moments.

His vocaliser hurt, he thought vaguely. He did not remember making much noise, but a vocaliser didn’t feel like that for any other reason.

Megatron smoothed one big hand over his thigh, up across the bright red armour of his hip. That felt nice, especially now that his sensors were all hot and sensitive and his armour was all relaxed, communicating much more of the touch to the components beneath. Mm.

“Your vocaliser,” Megatron said, drawing back, easing some of the weight of his big body off Starscream’s. He missed the crush of it immediately, even as he began to cool much more rapidly. “Hook will have it repaired – soon?”

Starscream grunted. He felt good, he was relaxed, he didn’t want to think about this. He didn’t want to think about much of anything. Grudgingly, he nodded. Yes. It would be soon. Hook’s timeline would end very soon, and Starscream would be back in the repair bay, screaming nonsense at him until he fixed it, about half an astrosecond after it had elapsed.

The slow, firm circles Megatron was massaging into his thigh and hip joint did not stop. Neither of them bothered to unhook their systems from each other. They both had excellent firewalls. There was no danger of accidental data exchange.

Megatron hummed thoughtfully and planted one hand on Starscream’s cockpit. He pressed him back onto the desk, flat. Data pads scattered and tumbled to the floor and Starscream ignored them, following the pressure of Megatron's hand willingly. For a moment their cables stretched out taut between their bodies, a strange pull that did not quite result in pain. Starscream dragged his legs up Megatron’s sides and purred as he crawled up over him, casting Starscream in his enormous shadow.

“Good,” rumbled Megatron into the curve of his jaw. Several sensitive cables lived there, and his hot vents washed right over them. Starscream tipped his head back to let him do more of that, shivering happily while his processor fuzzed over at the sweet feeling. “I can’t tolerate Skywarp as acting air commander much longer.”

_You and me both_, Starscream thought. He made an agreeing noise, and then arched when one of Megatron’s hands found a sensor on the underside of his wing that shot hot pleasure across his whole sensory network – by accident, he was pretty sure. But Megatron also knew how to take advantage of happy accidents, so he did it again. The connection between them throbbed, surging more charge into his sensitised circuitry at the same time. 

This time, Starscream really did hear his own wordless moaning – and he did not care in the slightest. 

Megatron did have to leave his office eventually – once Starscream let him, anyway, which was for once a decision Megatron seemed completely ready to leave up to Starscream’s whims. Starscream let him go first. They were close to the bridge here, and he was more than willing to let Megatron face the awkward looks (and equally awkward, purposeful non-looks) of whoever had the bridge shift. They hadn’t been exactly quiet.

Instead, Starscream ran the ventilation system in the hopes of getting rid of  _some _ of the scent of electrical discharge. It wasn’t going to fix the scorch mark in the shape of his wings on the desk, but he could cover that with… uh, something… until he had time to grind it off. 

He spent some time painstakingly writing out a memo to Skywarp to remind him that he  _did_ only have perhaps a cycle left to fix whatever nonsense he’d managed to enact with his so-called authority while Stascream had been indisposed – he was feeling unusually generous in the wake of having his every circuit completely fried. That did happen sometimes… 

He couldn’t let the strange sense of satisfaction and wellbeing get too far ahead of him, though – he did have a  _personal project _ he was working on, after all. Soon he’d be able to do more work on the drone’s voice imprint controls. While it was almost finished now in other respects, he could stand to do more work on its safety protocols. He didn’t want it hitting  _him_ , after all, even by accident. 

So it was that Starscream was feeling surprisingly mellow as he strolled through the Victory’s dark, creaking halls toward his laboratory once more.

It couldn't last.

When he arrived there, Megatron was waiting for him.

The door was wide open, which allowed him to see right in, and then his view was blocked by the broad silvery expanse of Megatron's back. Starscream stopped walking down the corridor and froze. He felt his wing twitch nervously at the sight, recently-loosened cables knotting right back up.

_What was Megatron even doing down here?_ Starscream wondered wildly. Megatron _never_ \-- but he remembered, then, how unsatisfied Megatron had seemed at discovering that Starscream had not sabotaged the raid, earlier, and he supposed he knew exactly what was going on here.

He took one slow, silent step backwards.

"You should be court-martialled for the state of this place," Megatron said conversationally, toeing what might once have been part of a table.

Clearly he wasn't going to escape, and to flee now would be tantamount to admitting guilt. The only way out was going to be through, in that case.

"I know where everything is," Starscream said, sauntering forward with a confidence he didn't quite feel. It didn't matter that this was a flat-out lie, because none of the words came out correctly anyway.

He crossed the threshold into the lab, edging cautiously around Megatron's lunging distance. A big reach, had Megatron. And Starscream's evasive manoeuvres were excellent, but he could not easily fly in the confines of the ship. He had nothing but disadvantages here.

...the lab was kind of a mess. His - ah - _minor display of frustration_ from joors earlier had taken its toll.

He picked his way through the broken plexiglass and metal to face Megatron. Then he crossed his arms. "And what brings you _all the way down here_ to visit?" he asked venomously.

Static. He was incomprehensible.

He knew it wasn't going to come out properly, but he couldn't seem to stop himself. Talking was ingrained. But he was getting awfully, irritably tired of the static.

Despite that, Megatron's expression indicated that he knew exactly what Starscream was saying, and in exactly what tone. They were, Starscream reflected, and not for the first time, a little too familiar with each other.

"Do I need to tell_ you,_ now, Starscream, where I go on my own ship?" he wondered. The tone of his voice was a warning.

Starscream made a face.

"What... _fascinating experiments_ you're running in your free time," Megatron said then.

Starscream felt a frission of anxiety flutter right up the supporting strut of his back.

Oh, yes. This could be trouble. He very intentionally did not glance at the drone. He didn't want to attract Megatron's attention to it if he hadn't already noticed it.

Of course, this was futile. Wishful thinking at best. The pitted and scarred carapace of the drone was both huge and bright purple, owing to its origins in the completely normally-shaped fortress that Megatron had previously had built out in the desert.

"I did think it odd," Megatron mused, turning to it with his optics gleaming alarmingly, "to have Soundwave find that you weren't plotting against me with that _idiotically botched_ raid. To think that was sheer incompetence..." He laughed, although it wasn't a very amused laugh, and his optics cut right back to Starscream.

Starscream was still. His own long-trained protocols were pinging him a threat alert with increasing urgency. His plating clamped down tightly and his wings shifted in answer, spreading wide and stiff to make him look bigger than he was. It didn't help. His fuel pump stuttered beneath his laser core.

Megatron ran one hand over the drone's thigh and patted it gently. "How... comforting," he added flatly.

Starscream twitched. If he could have spoken, he might have talked his way out of this - he might have claimed it was a weapon to be used against the Autobots, and not against Megatron. And what did it say, he thought savagely, that Megatron's very first assumption was that finding a weaponised drone in his own second in command's laboratory meant he was plotting to assassinate _him_? Starscream was the air commander of the entire Decepticon army! It did not automatically follow that all his weapons were for use against _Megatron._

He was torn between his self-righteous indignation, awe at Megatron's _towering conceit_, and a horrible, base code-deep fear that he was about to get hurt very, very badly.

"And look," Megatron said softly, holding up a datapad. "The equations for my armour... I suppose I should be flattered that you had to do them so many times."

Ah. Well. That... would have been _harder_ to explain... even had Starscream been in possession of the means to talk about it. He looked from the datapad to Megatron's face and back to the drone. Well.

Well.

Slowly, so as not too startle Megatron into any, ah, precipitous action, he began to edge back toward the door of the lab. The corridor would be tight, but he could transform and fly in there. In the lab? Not a chance.

Megatron moved faster than Starscream's cautious, doorwards motion.

His huge blunt fingers dug into Starscream's wing. The raw power that bled off his hands when he was so violently enraged was enough to drag a rapid wash of current right through the sensitive circuitry embedded in the flight mechanisms. Starscream spat static, and that was before Megatron hurled him against the table.

He slammed into it with a clatter, denting the plating around his waist and rocking the drone on its surface. "Megatron!" he yowled. The static came out as three syllables, but it was otherwise just white noise.

"Oh, no, Starscream," said Megatron. 

He could feel his huge frame right behind him, bleeding off heat with how worked up he was - with fury, with _rage_ \- and the heavy working internal mechanics of him thundering beneath the plates. With his circuitry still humming with Megatron's charge, the feeling was cruelly familiar -- and completely wrong. His armour could not have gotten any more tightly clamped.

Megatron's hollow, buzzing voice growled out right next to his audial sensors, and Starscream felt his own fans kick right up at the sound of it. "You can't talk yourself out of this... not least," he added, curling even heavier against Starscream's back, with his fingers digging harder into the exposed length of his wing, "because you _can't talk_."

Starscream screeched unintelligibly. It was, as Megatron had evidently expected, not a very convincing argument. Megatron shoved him harder, until the edge of the table made his armour creak. He heard his plating pop and winced as the pain of it crackled over his sensory net. The table rocked harder.

Starscream's circuitry was alight - with fury, with threat, with an overwhelming degree of sensation. There was the horrible whine of an overtaxed turbine, the smell of thrusters that refused to ignite. There was nowhere for him to go, not with Megatron holding him down. His strength was overwhelming.

The drone fell off the table as Starscream was shoved further onto it. He barely noticed past the screaming pain of his wing being bent out of shape, initially.

But then it onlined with an ominous grinding of metal and the dull roar of a heavy duty engine. As it stood up, Megatron's grip turned restraining instead of crushing.

The drone rose, and rose, with the creak and hiss and low grind of joints slowly accustoming themselves to use. Its inner mechanisms chugged along audibly in some horrible Frankensteinian chorus deep in its belly.

For a moment Starscream watched it and thought only: _I'm a genius. I'm so fragging clever! Look at it **go**._

And then he registered the steady, rising buzz of its _weapons systems_ powering up and his fuel pump stalled out completely. Three things became immediately apparent to him:

1\. The drone's weapons systems were designed to go right through Megatron's armour, and would therefore go through pretty much anything

2\. Starscream had no access to his voice, and therefore no way of stopping the drone, or even of aiming it

3\. Without further input the drone had one priority command to follow, which --

"Destroying Megatron," it said in the pleasantly neutral voice of an accessible AI making a notification aloud.

\-- yes. That. Exactly that.

Unfortunately, Starscream was held fast to the lab table -- _right in front of Megatron._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so sorry, despite all probability, Starscream going "what! how DARE he suspect me??" while basically being the most openly suspicious person on the entire Decepticon war ship hasn't really stopped being hilarious humour to me oops
> 
> Otherwise, just one more chapter and we're all gonna be free of this phew


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hey, Starscream, do you take constructive criticism?

Every system Starscream had abruptly prioritised his sympathetic flight reflex.

Anything that was not of immediate, desperate importance just disappeared utterly: all of his notifications about system efficiency and fuel conversion dropped out. His temperature gauge stopped communicating. There was no injury data, no chronological data, minimal access to his background or long-term processing.

Instead, every available resource rerouted itself to apply one, overwhelming imperative: _Fly_, his coding screamed, _fly, **fly**!_

The howl of all his internals kicking into high gear did not drown out the sound of the drone's laser cannons warming – those cannons he’d so carefully calibrated to go _right through Megatron’s armour_ before which his own lighter plating would be as effective as_ aluminium scrap_. Laboratory debris crumpled beneath its huge, scarred feet.

"You won't shoot me through your creator," Megatron decided confidently. He hauled Starscream up and held him fast before him, between Megatron's big frame and the drone.

"You idiot!" Starscream shrieked. His vocaliser screebled ineffectually.

He kicked and struggled, at first wildly because his coding was screaming at him, and then with more precision as he got a handle on it and training kicked in. He rammed his heel down into the vulnerable joint of Megatron's ankle, he slammed one wing up into the big idiot's face. It did nothing, except to add to the cacophony of sound in the lab.

The drone, immune to all concerns except for its single, crystal clear mandate, raised its laser cannon. It was so close that Starscream could smell the acrid chemical and burnt-ozone scent of it. He could see the glowing charge gathering in its barrel.

"Megatron!" he wailed, thrashing in his grip.

Although the word itself was lost to static, something about the desperation of Starscream's struggling must have penetrated the _yawning cranial cavity _where better mechs than Megatron kept their processors, because Megatron went very still for a quarter-astrosecond behind him.

"Starscream," he hissed, furious, and then he twisted and hurled both of them to the laboratory floor just as the laser cannon fired.

The very walls shook with the sound.

Starscream saw the flash of blinding light fire through the space they'd occupied before he even hit the floor. When he did, all the air blew through his vents with a rattle.

He barely registered the impact. The whole room was bathed in bright light – all shadows wiped away, all visual data lost under a sea of confused queries, corrupted by the sudden explosive change in sensory information.

Then the light was gone, the air smelled of burnt metal and rubbers and blistering circuitry, and Megatron's entire weight was on his back, forcing his wing to flex, crushing his cockpit into the floor. Starscream heaved, shoving and rocking, wings clattering against Megatron's plating.

He could already hear the drone moving around, huge feet crushing the scrap metal that was strewn upon the lab's floor.

"Get – off – me!" he snarled, fighting his way out from beneath Megatron's ridiculous bulk.

He scrambled to his feet as Megatron finally moved his gargantuan aft – apparently he was too dim to fully comprehend the danger they were both in and –

_Oh._

There was a hole in the wall of Starscream's laboratory. It was about as big as half his wingspan. The laser cannon's blast had gone right through the next room and thrown their storage into smoking disarray, and left a hole in the opposite wall as well. Burnt wire and scorched metal surrounded the damage. For a moment he could only stare. He could see right into the neighbouring room and into the room on the other side of that.

The Victory was made of local materials, but it was rated for space travel. It was not a flimsy ship.

Two rooms over, Ravage leaned up, peered cautiously through the hole, and immediately flattened his audio sensors to his helm upon seeing Starscream staring at him. One of the sharp points had clearly been clipped by the laser, and was now showing bare metal and darkened circuitry.

There was a split-second's pause as they stared at each other. He bared his sharp teeth at Starscream from the distance.

"Destroying Megatron," the drone notified them from somewhere nearby.

Megatron's huge hand gripped the back of Starscream's neck, right above his wings, and hauled him away from the hole.

"Starscream! Turn it off before it _floods us_," he snarled.

Starscream stared helplessly into his glowing red optics. It didn't _have_ an off button. It had a stop command, and the only thing it would stop for was Starscream's voice. 

Megatron shook him violently, but Starscream could only shove him in the chest and wave vaguely at his own vocaliser.

"You're not serious," Megatron said incredulously. "Not only does it not have a fail-safe to stop _you_ from getting blown up –" Starscream wriggled in Megatron's grip. It was a work in progress! He hadn't started it rampaging! He didn't want to hear constructive criticism from _Megatron_! "- it doesn't even have an emergency shut down sequence?"

Well... no. It didn't. Because, logically, someone would surely have exploited such an opening to shut it down.

Starscream could not adequately communicate any of this in just wriggling, static and futile shoving at Megatron's enormous chassis, so he instead smacked Megatron's arm and pointed.

Megatron stopped his overblown posturing and looked.

Megatron swore.

In unison, as though choreographed, they separated and dove.

The next obliteratively bright blast went straight through a different wall, and the second Starscream heard the horrid, ominous hissing, the very moment he looked up and saw the enormous cloud of steam and knew exactly what had happened.

He felt like his tank rolled over and sloshed unhappily with half-processed fuel at the very sight.

The Victory wasn’t designed to take that sort of damage from the inside.

Alarms began to shrill immediately across the ship. The wall, not yet visible through the steam, gave a deep, ominous groan through the hissing.

And Megatron must have heard it too. "_Starscream._”

Starscream looked around, taking in the scene in an astrosecond: Megatron, struggling to his feet and already snarling for Starscream's energon; the drone, wheeling around heavily and lining up for another shot; the lab, trashed; the ship’s hull, punctured and ready to flood.

He leapt up, steady on his feet, then ducked through the lab's doorway, transformed mid-step and took off at high speed. The air rippled around him as he cracked the sound barrier.

"**STARSCREAM,**" Megatron howled behind him.

That was the sound of absolute, perfect _rage__._

Over the public address, system Soundwave's unhurried droning voice punctuated the shrill alarms: "Hull breached. Recommendation: evacuate."

Distantly, Starscream picked up the sound of the pleasant, uninflected voice of the drone again: "Destroying Megatron."

One of his wings was bent from Megatron's rough handling, so Starscream's flight weaved as listed to one side, then over-corrected and then listed again. Even the hideous sound of his wingtip grinding against a metal wall could not slow him down.

There was the sense deep in his tanks that the Unmaker in all his fury might be coming up behind him, and some terrible primitive instinct told him not to look back – neither at Megatron, nor the drone, nor the rush of sea water and steam coursing down the Victory's lower corridors while around him the ship groaned and bent and buckled.

He hit the broader, upper areas of the ship and put on speed, heedless of the shouts of the others he zoomed past.

The tower was fully extended and open, and Soundwave was beside it, ignoring the mechs all scrambling to get out before any of the electrical systems in the ship met the water in some potentially spectacular fashion. As he approached, Starscream swerved – someone screamed – to avoid Ravage, who kicked out a vent cover from above, narrowly avoided Starscream's wing, and performed an acrobatic mid-leap transformation to dock within Soundwave's body. The cassette dock closed with a familiar, final _click._

They blurred as he flew, and then Starscream was well past them, twisting in the air, slicing upwards until he was hurtling vertically up the tower. The air rushed past in a roar. He was pretty sure he nearly took off one o Vortex's rotors in his ascent, but the yelling and the swearing dropped away as the sky fell down to meet him.

He rose higher and higher and higher still, until the other Decepticons were spots and dots, anxiously milling and wondering what had prompted their abrupt evacuation.

Skywarp warped into reality next to him as he began to circle above.

The comm clicked. "What's going on? What could possibly – you'd need a _fortress-class _cannon to get through the Victory's hull," Thundrcracker said incredulously via a tight trine channel.

_You would,_ Starscream thought, _yes._

Skywarp glanced at him. "Hey," he said aloud. "Didn't..."

Starscream twitched. Even in jet mode, it was an obvious tell.

"Er," said Skywarp then, over the channel. "I bet the wear on the hull had something to do with it. All that salt. Water. Currents. You know. All that... stuff," he added unconvincingly.

So unconvincingly, in fact, that when Thundercracker shot past them in jet form, slowed, turned and looped back to transform and hover on his antigravs, the first thing he said was: "Please tell me this isn't some kind of moronic prank."

"Alright," said Skywarp easily, unruffled by the force of Thundercracker’s flight past, "this isn't some kind of moronic prank."

Thundercracker squinted at him. "Oh," he said. "You're serious?" This was in the tone of one who had picked out a thousand of Skywarp's lies. "What is it? It's not the Autobots. ...Is it?"

"Um," said Skywarp, with a glance at Starscream he probably thought was subtle. "I don't think so?"

The Victory was deep beneath the sea but while he watched the water swelled up violently right over where it lay.

This was it, Starscream realised, watching ever more eagerly. The ship's systems would deliver an almighty shock, one that must stun even Megatron. His circuits would overload, and not in a fun way – the amount of power would send him staggering offline, and then there would be no way to avoid the drone.

That meant that the moment of Starscream's triumph was at hand at last.

He wished he could see the security feeds from inside the ship, but none of the ones he needed to access remained on the network. He felt – oh, he didn't know what he felt. _Transcendent_. Triumphant. Satisfied. Vindicated. A glowing, swelling pride, humming beneath his laser core like it was a real, physical sensation.

And yet – amid the jumble, the curious rumblings of fear and disappointment made themselves known. Mighty Megatron, brought low by a drone made of scraps and a derelict ship?

Yes. It was... a bit of a disappointment. Megatron had weathered so many of Starscream's attempts upon him and responded, fearlessly, only with scorn and this was... the glowing feeling curdled a little. It was a small, sharp and incongruous note winding through Starscream's routines, deep in the lowest levels of his emotional processing, souring the rest of his feelings – but it was small, and the anticipation and triumph quickly drowned it out.

Megatron was about to face his curtain call upon this stage of Starscream's devising and – nearly – everything in him was straining, hard and hungry for the moment that his master’s life sign dropped off their scanners for good.

"We're losing altitude?" Thundercracker said suddenly.

"Nah," corrected Skywarp, whose navigational equipment and assessment protocols were better – because they had to be, for orienting himself after warping was a tricky feat – "we're not losing altitude. The water's just rising."

And so it was: swelling huge and fast right beneath them, over the sunken Victory. Soundwave, who was here hovering low on his antigravs, rose rapidly into the sky. Smart Decepticons followed him, trusting his threat assessment over their own observations.

"Ramjet," said Thundercracker over the general comms, having noticed one of the _other_ kinds of Decepticons,"pull back!"

The other seeker looked up at them, hesitating before he obeyed Thundercracker, and therefore missed the way the water turned white and frothy below. Starscream's thermal scans were showing increased activity, too.

"Ramjet!" he snapped, all static. He was going to have that idiot running drills and import verification for all his free time for an orn or more!

Inattentiveness was its own reward: Ramjet was knocked out of the air when the water geysered up in an explosion of heat and steam and, briefly, a terrible flash of red light.

This was it, Starscream thought, ignoring the heat reports as boiling seawater spat against his undercarriage, across his canopy and along the delicate sensors of his wings. His fuel pump hammered.

Any second now, Megatron's life sign would disappear from his scans.

Any moment. Any -

Something huge, and smoking, and around the edges, bright purple, came hurtling out of the steam. "What –?"

Skywarp made a startled noise and disappeared with the unique, familiar buzz of his warp drive engaging.

Starscream was not quite so fast.

Propelled with pinpoint accuracy, the mangled remains of the drone slammed into him from below. Both drone and seeker went careening through the sky. Somewhere he could hear Thundercracker yelling. A slag heap of help that was!

While his navigational system streamed fantastical nonsense at him and he spun dizzily through the air, Starscream could also hear one other thing: Megatron's voice, howling his name, in a towering fit of fury. "_**STARSCREAM**_!"

He swung free, finally, of the heavy remains of the drone – or some part of the drone, anyway – and tumbled in free fall for a second until he knew which way was up again. Then he fired his thrusters in an uncontrolled ascent – away from the yelling, away from the impact, just _away_.

He heard the telltale hum of Megatron's fusion cannon and performed a perfect, textbook evasive roll through the air._ You won't catch me, Megatron,_ he thought as it passed right by in a flash of light,_ I'm too fast for you._

The second blast, presumably aimed not at where he was, but along the path Megatron had predicted him to fly, took him straight through one wing.

Agony rippled through his circuits and came out his vocaliser in a wail of static. He could smell it: wires destroyed and melting, the nauseating smell of burnt polish. His plating cracked around the wound in ugly black marks. Energon splattered his side and streaked the metal of his canopy, bright pink and grizzly.

The coastline rushed up to meet him. The introduction hurt.

There was a frozen astrosecond and a tremendous, world-shaking _crunch_. He felt it with every part of his frame. It stalled his vents and slowed his turbines to a hideous clunking, and even his powerful engine stuttered at the shock of impact. The earth below heaved and tore around him, and the crater was impressive.

Starscream kicked the error messages out of primary processing in batches and gritted his teeth through a painful core dump while half his primary systems rebooted. His fans went from stalled out to screaming as soon as they came online again.

He heaved himself to his hands and knees, which prompted a new barrage of error codes. He could smell the energon. A bright pink message flashed, urgent, urgent: his fuel levels were dropping fast.

"Destroying Megatron," stuttered something nearby.

Starscream heaved one deep vent, in, out, blasting as much heat free of his overworked systems as he could, and then turned his head. His neck hurt. An error code sprung up. He dismissed it, too.

He'd landed near the drone - or, well, the drone's head. The rest of it was nowhere to be seen. It cast sparks from the empty fixture of its neck and smoked and, after a moment, said again: "Dest... roy... ing... Mega. Mega." It crackled.

"Oh, shut up," growled Starscream.

Predictably, nothing but static emerged.

And then came the earth shaking thunder of a very large, very angry mech approaching. Starscream cringed and curled in on himself. His wings twitched, pulling in, trying to protect the injured surface by presenting it as less of a target.

"Starscream," said Megatron from way, way too close. "No, no," he said softly, sweetly, "don't get up." The fusion cannon hummed again. "You're _exactly where I want you_."

Starscream braced himself, but point blank blasts from oversize fusion cannons were extremely high on the list of things which could not, really, be braced for.

"Megatron," he said, and it never even helped to beg when Megatron could understand him, but he could not seem to help himself. _Please_, he thought,_ please, please please do not shoot me. _His wings flicked and twitched and then jerked back in again. "Please – I beg of you– ” Static.

"Enough snivelling," Megatron said, and then shot him.

Starscream's begging cut off into a staticky shriek, which ended with a confused mechanical whine, and then a buzz, and then only silence.

* * *

Starscream's sensory suite came online and he knew Megatron was right there beside him before he even turned his optics on. At least it meant he hadn’t been captured, he thought, very slowly. Even the Autobots wouldn’t be dumb enough to put them in the same cell.

His basic scans picked up his enormous life sign and his chemoreceptors detected the scents of cordite and the unfashionably cheap products Megatron used for spot-waxing. He could smell also, undeniably, the energon, steel and sealant smells of the repair bay.

Other than not being a prisoner of war, coming to in the repair bay with Megatron sitting near by meant nothing good. In the best case scenario it might mean he'd preformed some kind of accidentally heroic feat of suicidality upon the battlefield and was very badly injured.

He groaned.

The sound came out clear and free of interference, but his short term memory files were still unpacking and he was not sure why this surprised and relieved him.

He turned his optics on and let them adjust to the light. Then he turned his head, slowly, in the direction where he could feel Megatron's weighty gaze set upon him. Even turning his _helm_ hurt. What kind of battle –?

"Starscream,” Megatron rumbled. It was a positively tectonic sound in the quiet repair bay, low and hollow and ancient, and deep enough to feel beneath his chest plates. Familiar.

“...M’gatron?” The routines for vocal output booted completely by the end of the word.

“I can't imagine,” Megatron said contemplatively, meeting his bleary optics with clear, sharp red ones, "the sheer progress that the Decepticon cause might make if you focused even a fraction of the same energy you expend trying futilely to undermine me on _doing your actual job_, Starscream."

He groaned again. "I am injured," he grieved, shifting painfully away from Megatron's much larger, and, according to several protocols that never seemed to stop running their background assessments, increasingly threatening, body, "be nice to me."

Megatron made a crude noise, synthesised, like someone's vents coughing oil. "You got off lightly," he said. The sound of his voice was a warning.

The files were trickling loose now, unfolding their data across Starscream's processor. Oh yes. That was right. His language processing centres had been damaged. They seemed all right now, though.

...He _might_ have gotten off lightly. He'd know, if his systems could read the files that actually told him how he'd been injured. They were corrupted from what experience told him was probably a particularly vicious blow to the processor. Megatron was probably lying.

"The hull breach has been contained," Megatron said, leaning back. _Hull breach, hull breach_, Starscream thought, optics flickering as his data was rapidly searched. Oh. _Ohh_. "But you'll need to repair the affected areas and clear the water out."

This already sounded like cruel and unusual punishment. Could he just take another beating? Starscream grunted. It was every bit as ugly a noise as the one Megatron had made. It might have come out a little sulky and petulant. Maybe.

"How, exactly, do you expect me to do that?"

The repairs weren't necessarily the issue there – but his lagging processor still knew that draining the water might be. Even for Cybertronians, the pressures involved at the bottom of Sol-3’s vile little oceans were huge.

"Use your imagination," said Megatron. "Luckily, your ingenuity _almost_ matches your cowardice."

Helpful as usual. Starscream was too tired to express his irritation, though he still felt it. His frame was taxed beyond its tolerance, and his automatic repair systems were running at their fullest capacity. He needed to put himself into recharge and stay there for a while, or else he'd burn through all his fuel just running his own background processing alongside them.

"Then, when you're done with that, you can repair that drone, since you've already wasted so many resources on it. Those cannons are absurdly overpowered. We'll set it loose in some human settlement before the next major raid."

He got to his feet with a creaking of metal joints and cables that barely scratched the surface of suggesting how old he really was.

Ancient. _Obsolete_. Starscream hummed quietly, watching, calculating.

"For now, rest. Hook tells me you need it. I expect you back on raids within the cycle," he added. There was a moment’s pause, and then one heavy, dark hand rested on the side of his helm. It was warm, and despite all of Starscream’s constant assessment protocols, there was nothing that registered as threatening in the movement. "Skywarp is not an adequate raid leader."

Well, of course not. At least not comparatively – he wasn't Starscream, after all.

Starscream cycled his optics numbly. He resisted the urge to lean into the touch for all of 0.3 astroseconds.

"As you command," he said aloud, with questionable sincerity. Megatron made a soft, scoffing noise in his vents, lifted his hand and turned away, displaying his broad retreating back. His plates gleamed under the bright lights of the repair bay, silvery and burnished.

His back would have looked even better with a real target painted across it, instead of the one Starscream's tactical software helpfully and automatically provided. He dismissed its suggestion that he had an exceptionally clear close range shot right now.

He fell back against the mediberth, letting it cushion his poor, cracked... everything.

"Just you wait," he mumbled, slanting his dimming optics toward Megatron's silhouette. He passed out of the range of Starscream's optical sensors fast, but he could still be tracked through other means. "My time will... time will come."

His optics offlined all on their own.

Distantly, from somewhere deeper in the repair bay, he heard Scavenger say, "Do you think he knows he talks like that when he recharges?"

Hook answered, something snappish and condescending, but Starscream was already too deep in recharge to process the answer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's done and now I can punt this fic into the sun, it took 55 days to post and I'm **d o n e**, GOODBYE, FIC. 
> 
> Huge thanks to everybody who left me a comment. At time of posting they were all _incredibly encouraging_ and friendly, so thank you heaps. If you're looking for me on social media my twitter is [here](https://twitter.com/fascination_ex/status/1182930536475459584)
> 
> If there was something you liked about this fic please feel free to let me know in a comment (if commenting is your jam). Otherwise, thanks for reading and have a nice night. :)


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